Gavan Reilly

It’s coming! To all of Ireland! Except…

• It’s being provided by 3 Ireland, the most unreliable mobile broadband provider of the three main mobile networks, with 386 pages of complaints on a megathread on Boards.ie
• Everyone in the country is expected to use a USB dongle. No, seriously. A USB dongle.
• the National Broadband Scheme now apparently only covers the “last 10% of the Irish population”, and so the Government saw fit to seek tenders instead of letting the market go after the other 400,000 peeople – without even seeing if takeup would be good enough?
• 3 will have to spend 21 months doing building at 390 locations, “160 of which are new”. To provide basic high-speed mobile services for 400,000 people?!
• 3 are committed to getting it done “within the 21 month deadline”, but are forgetting “a requirement for planning permission and scope for possible delays if appeals are lodged”

If anything positive has come from it, it looks like we may at least have a new telecommunications saviour in our midst.

Labour described the schme as underwhelming, with Senator Alan Kelly criticising the speeds provided under the plan. He described Minister Ryan’s moves as ‘a hodge-podge of wireless, satellite and land line solutions and that will leave Ireland in the technological dark ages’.

Frankly, when my parents’ house is still struggling to get a phone line 26 months after moving in, I couldn’t give a monkeys if 3 are going to spend millions so that we have can have a shitty USB dongle when we already have a shitty O2 one in the first place.

Sometimes I wonder if the Green Party have a bet on somewhere, with an underground bookies in Angola, seeing if they can become the world’s worst Government party of all time. Here’s a tip: put money on Eamon Ryan getting whipped across the face with a USB dongle if he comes within twenty paces of me.

So, today’s the day. Blue Monday has been and gone and a proper Blue Tuesday dawns upon us. As if you needed reminding, today’s the day that Barack Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States. Frankly there’s no escaping it – front page stories, homepage homages, radio rebuttals and television topics worldwide are all eminate to one story today.

While nobody should realistically expect Obama to be the be-all-and-end-all as regards the message of change and reform of the west’s creaking political establishments, Obama’s inauguration does bring – if only for a little while – the prospect of tangible change, where no longer do we have a Leader of the Free World™ whose inarticulation makes for an easy scapegoat in the current problems the world finds itself, but rather a bestselling author, noted academic, and the personal embodiment of everything the 2009 zeitgeist demands of its leaders.

For me the highlight of Obama’s historic rise to the top of the political pile was the surpassing and genial use that he and his campaign made of the social networks and media that we, as citizens of the third millennium and the information age, use to talk to each other. Obama & Co had their fingers on the pulse to know that traditional media was becoming too fragmented for it to be the exclusive source of campaign news for voters, and that only enormous media buys – nailing down a half-hour segment on every main TV network in the run-up, for example – would be enough to get people onside. They knew that a speech couldn’t be mediocre for it to be well-received: in the age of YouTube, every word of every speech was always available. Thus, they embraced the means that you and I use to talk to each other: social networks, microblogging, social video networks. Obama nobly sacrificed climactical style for emotive and political substance in his speeches and made them all available online, and set up a notable – and what’s more, active – presence on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The results were phenomenal: by Election Day Obama had 125,000 followers on Twitter (he currently has 140,000 exactly), 3 million fans on Facebook and half as many again on MySpace. By talking to people on their own means, and in their own time, Obama bypassed the need to have people pay attention when he wanted them to.

Since election, however, these channels have sadly become little more than heartfelt souvenirs of the epic campaign that had long passed. While the Office of the President-Elect has set up a very Web 2.0-esque website at change.gov – including YouTube and Twitter accounts – the level of interactivity and responsiveness of these accounts has been sorely lacking. Fireside chats posted on YouTube are all well and good – well, to be fair, they’re better than well and good – but active consultation with the citizenry who spawned such critical and spirited debates with each other is quite another matter indeed.

Frankly, there are a few steps in online life that every elected public representative, no matter how menial or trivial their work, should be taking – and largely it’s a blueprint that Obama himself laid out, which others have since taken to the levels they ought to aspire to. Firstly, every politician ought to be on Twitter (and I mean every politician) – but not only should they have an account that they use, they should Tweet more actively and more honestly. Don’t do what Obama did and merely say “At a Vote For Change rally in Raleigh, NC. Watch online at (link)”. Say something like:

Voting on the Dáil floor on vital amendments to the Anglo Irish Bank Bill. Enjoyed the tense and spirited debate here today.

Be open, be accountable, but be honest. What people hate most about politicians is that they all seem so uniformly phlegmatic and without really empathy or emotion. Twitter – even if you use it the shallow way and ignore responses – is the perfect response. (Responding to your @ replies would be a bonus too, but take one step at a time. John Culberson literally can’t keep up with the replies he gets as a Texan congressman.)

Of course, no politician should be ever allowed to hold a public office without keeping a blog (frankly it should be mandatory). Even if your posts are far less frequent than they should be, just try to take out a half-hour a month to write about what you’ve been up to that your constituents won’t know about; what your priorities are; what anecdotes you’ve been told that you think deserve a wider audience… just blog! For the love of God, blog! Think of it like your Twitter but without the crummy character limit. You have as much time as you want to air your personal thoughts to the world, outside of the constraints of the traditional media – use it. Supplement your canned press releases with more honest follow-up on why your local area needs the new childcare facility you’ve secured, or how the rezoning of local land will help the people you’re elected to serve.

If you’re undertaking something that words can’t describe, open a Flickr. This is perhaps the most invaluable thing that Barack Obama’s team brought to the electoral playbook, as far as the public are concerned: since the account was opened, and posted pictures of that chilly morning when the skinny kid with the funny name said he wanted to be President, Obama’s team have posted 53,526 photos of the campaign – every pit-stop, every photocall, every behind-the-scenes gaffe, and even the moment when the networks called the election and John McCain broadcast his concession to the world. Again, people see politicians as being too robotic and without emotion to have touching moments like that, it’s why there was such uproar at the “terrorist fist-jab” Obama and Michelle shared onstage.Show yourself to the person you are.

And finally, use the social media that the people use. Set up a profile on Facebook and its competitors, and set up a page where people can pledge their suppotr to you. Set up groups – “Senior Citizens for Obama” or whatever. A politician is lucky to have people set up unofficial supporters clubs for them – but how much better is a supporters’ club going to be if it’s run and operated by you, and where the talking points and overall discussion are on matters that you, as the public figure and as the owner of the group, lay down for it? There may well have been a “Students for Obama” group without the team needing to set one up – but if you control the meeting space, you can manipulate it so that your followers will do whatever you need them to.

On a momentous day like today it hurts to remember that I’m a young Irishman; I’ve never seen my country be the centre of the world stage for all the right reasons. I’ve never had a public figure grab my attention and sway my emotions like those in the United States have had. I don’t have a Barack Obama – and even if I buy into him, he doesn’t rule my country. Any positive effects Obama might have on Ireland will be entirely accidental.What could come from this incredible era, though, is that the only man who the whole world regards as a role model, could make this incredible leap to the 21st century where every public figure, every public body, every office and department, recognises the power of their public and online presence, and spread its Gospel.

Imagine leaving behind a world where everyone who had a responsibility to the public, showed the public how seriously they took it, and made us feel more educated along the way? Now that would be a legacy someone could be proud of.

Mr Obama, I wish you well, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.

There’s something magical about the internet that sets it apart from other media – that no matter where one might be using it, or what the circumstances of the user, the internet always looks the same. Going to gavreilly.com in Ireland or California (hi Cat!) or Munich is no different*. The page, content, feel, navigability of a site is perfectly uniform for everyone, everywhere in the world – and to me, that’s a far more special attribute than the universality of TV or radio. In fact, I’d predict that once the world develops sufficiently to the point that everyone has access to a phone line, and once laptops become cheap enough for them to be bought on a wholescale international basis, we’ll see an enormous schism in media as we know it.

Just a brief thought to bear in mind. Next time you’re watching an international spoting event, or perhaps Obama’s Inauguration next Tuesday, have a think about the incredible ability of human kind to manufacture systems where a single microphone placed at a human mouth, and a single camera pointed at a human face, can be manipulated, formatted, resolved, condensed and transmitted, and broadcast to someone on the other side of the world with a portable television, with such speed as to make the whole process seem instantaneous. This is the miracle of human endeavour: the fact that Obama will speak into one microphone, or twenty-two footballers will take to a single patch of grass, and have that activity transmitted worldwide (I mean literally worldwide; I don’t mean this word lightly, or in a figurative sense) at the speed of light and at the blink of an eye, is a product of extraordinary human agility and magnificence – not to mention that we have the ability to send ourselves to the moon and back, and the fact that broadcasting as we know it existed long before the advent of broadband made global communication so much easier.

It is this, above all else, that sets human beings apart from their companions on planet earth. The desire of the human to innovate and create, for entertainment or therapy, for fun or medicine – now that‘s something worth celebrating. We may have made drastic changes to this world, or even wrecked it: but in doing so, we have done some marvellous, awesome things.

* Unless you’re using Internet Explorer, in which case the stylesheet doesn’t load as properly as it should. I’ll get to fixing that though, I promise.

Do Ministers actually ever talk to each other? You have to wonder. Maybe Fine Gael are doing such sniping these days that the cabinet have to divert their attention to fending off the opposition rather than managing to attend meetings, or lob each other the odd text message.

Last week, trying to capitalise on the empty news cycles, the Government launched their Sustainable Travel and Transport Action Plan, basically encouraging people to use public transport in getting to work – or better yet, get them to try and work from home as much as practicable. Not a bad idea – anything to get cars off the road surely helps the country out, and saving the inevitably arduous task of having to build another lane onto the M50 in, oh, about three weeks.

But then, as quietly as they could manage it, we had the subtle news – ironically, while people weren’t supposed to be reading the papers – that Luas ticket prices are going up by 5c, Dublin Bus are raising their fares by 10c a pop, Bus Éireann and Iarnród Éireann are hiking them by 10% – even the already ludicrously overpriced taxis are getting another 50c put on the initial fare.

Now, it doesn’t take the TK Whitakers of this world to realise that this, rather than stimulating their use, will put them off. What’s particularly irking, though, is that such moves come at a time when it’s becoming gradually cheaper to drive. Granted, cars aren’t getting cheaper, but insurance – the thing that usually stops 22-year-old males from The Pale like myself from taking to the roads – has become more realistically priced, and petrol is constantly coming down. The Esso across the road from my student gaff sold diesel for 119.5c a litre when we moved in last May – now it’s down to 93.5c, and it’s not going to get any higher for a while, no matter what swindles OPEC might try to unleash on the rest of the world.

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Watching the opening night of Celebrity Big Brother tonight, I kept an eye on the relevant Wikipedia entry, and specifically the Contestants section.

When Wikipedia first became famous, and the battles raged over whether it would ever succeed Encyclopedia Brittanica – or god forbid, Encarta! – in terms of moral standing and infallability, one of things that led me to argue for Wikipedia was its far superior grasp of pop culture, niche interests, and modern media. Quite simply, you’re not likely to find an article like this in Britannica anytime soon – and if you’re looking for details of the next Futurama movie, you’re basically going to be gutted.

What becomes even more unique is when you watch a major international event on Wikipedia. Tom Raftery tells a story about how he was surfing Wikipedia while listening to RTE Radio 1 when the appointment of the new Pope was announced in 2005. Hearing the name ‘Ratzinger’ live from the Vatican, and recognising the name, he went to the Wikipedia entry for Joseph Ratzinger, and saw it changed already – as quickly as an RTE hack could translate it – to that of Pope Benedict XVI.

Well, mix the pop culture abilities, and the live nature, and you a potently hilarious mixture. I won’t try to commentate on them, but while the contestants were entering the house, all of the following were visible on live updates of the show’s Wikipedia entry:

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