A Generation Of Misunderstanding

It would have been twenty-five years ago, a generation ago. I was invited onto a working party reporting to the European Commission. The subject was what was then referred to in broad terms as electronic publishing. We knew about the internet, we knew (vaguely) about what was about to come - the world wide web - we knew about database publishing and we knew about how different nets (networks) had been functioning primarily for military and academic purposes. What we didn't know and nor did the Commission was where this might all lead in terms not just of publishing but also information provision.

The working party was not unique in having an environment in which a certain tension existed. At my company this was called, because it suited the organisation's politics, creative tension, when in reality it was purely tension. On the one side were the strategists, the marketers, the businesspeople. On the other side were the technology buffs. At that time, it is perhaps fair to say, the techies looked down on their counterparts. They understood the gobbledegook. The business side didn't. The result was usually argument rather than proposal or action.

I was a non-technologist in search of a technologically understandable (possibly) organisational business model. Certain things had led me to where I was at that time in terms of thinking. One, from a few years before, had been a boss's insistence that I familiarise myself with Edward de Bono and lateral thought. Another was meeting someone called Peter Schwartz, nowadays referred to as a "futurist", then the head of scenario planning with Royal Dutch Shell. Schwartz dealt with what-ifs on a grand scale. Little was not possible, if you only applied your thoughts to it.

There were other influences, such as what Jan Carlzon had implanted as CEO of the Scandinavian Airlines System, i.e. an organisational pyramid with the customer at its peak, and any amount of case-study research from Harvard and elsewhere into the application and diffusion of then recent innovations in applied technology - the PC, the Mac, the digital watch, the Sony Walkman.  

What if Carlzon's pyramid was adapted? It could still be the customer on top of the pyramid, but who was the customer? Or rather, who would be the customer? Would the customer be more than this? A user perhaps. The term user had little currency at that time, but it was there nevertheless. The nets which ultimately led Tim Berners-Lee to the web had users. PCs had users. What if there was a wholesale shift of values within society, towards greater technology acceptance and use? Advances had in the few years before suggested there might be.

This was the essence of the model. It wasn't one which foresaw technological developments or their rapidity, but it was one to form the bones onto which the flesh of those developments might be grafted, and a generation on, it is pretty much how technology now is. The intensity has increased enormously of course, but organisations of all types have come to understand that the user sits on top of the pyramid and is there to be served. Or maybe one should say that some organisations understand this model.

Something else that would have been hard to foretell was just how much societal values were to alter. There might have been a clue from the bulletin boards which pre-dated the web and the forums which sprang up once it was established. But it needed a game-changer, and that was Amazon, not because of its original book delivery service but because of the facility for user review. It was Amazon which popularised the notion of user opinion on the web; readers in its case. From this came all manner of opinion, recommendations and criticisms. The genie was out of the bottle and it has proved to be unstoppable in the ways in which information is shared and sought after. It is now hard to conceive of a time when a fundamental shift in society's values in its use and acceptance of technology might even have been questioned.

All this leads to the present day and to Mallorca and to its tourism. Some organisations get it. The regional government doesn't. Where are the users (the tourists) in its model? Heaven knows. They are not recognised by there being the means for information sharing - through official channels of social media. They are not recognised by there being an appreciation of the latest leap in societal values, namely the whole culture of sharing and the technological applications which enable this, the P2P phenomenon which is proving to be a further game-changer.  The government is oblivious to the user, to his or her values. It is beholden to those who might say that they have the user (customer) at the top of their pyramids: the tour operators who shove product at the customer and call it a brand in the hope that a loyalty is created which itself is questionable in a user-led society that has outsmarted the conventions of business; and also to the hoteliers, latecomers to product as branding, but safeguarding and indeed reinforcing a model in which the hotel is the tourist experience in an age when "experiences" have taken on an alternative meaning, enabled by sharing, which goes way beyond the confines of the hotel campus.

It is as though the last twenty-five years haven't happened. A generation ago the tourist was fed limited information that did his or her thinking. The tourist was constrained in his or her outlook by the boundaries of non-technological society. This is not how it now is. The tourist is a flexible user in conversation with others - peers if you like - who are not part of a still rigid tourism model. Twenty-five years on, and it is not understood who it is who drives an organisation. The user.

The Know-All: Mobile information

I know everything.

There is nowhere I don't know. I am walking, talking information, a mobile information office. My Mastermind subject is the location of this or that. I shouldn't have to be. There are other forms of mobile information: the mobile phone, the TomTom for example. Or they could be, should be even. When will mobile information really catch on, do you suppose? When will it be unnecessary for everyone to be walking, talking dispensers of information, or not?

There's a petrol station in Puerto Alcúdia. It's the one by the Platja d'Or and Ivory Playa hotels, opposite the Eroski. I can tell you, without the need to refer to anything, assuming you cared, which you almost certainly wouldn't, the names of the roads in the vicinity. See, I know everything. Roses, Roselles, Savines, Vidalba, Oms. Any other road you want to know? Any hotel you want to know? How do I know all this? Because I do, and because I draw maps. Or used to, before maps were googled. There's a good google map of hotels and petrol stations and other places in Alcúdia. One I know about. I need to mention it some time ... to the chico ...

The chico didn't come out to fill the tank. I say fill the tank, no one fills a tank full now because petrol has become so expensive, not even the chico who's meant to fill the tank; the chico who normally comes out, but he didn't. So now I'm in the "shop", I suppose you call it that now. Now that it is a shop. I've partially filled the tank myself. The chico is glaring at a laptop. This is why he has not attended to being the pump-attendant. A red-faced German is by the counter. Red-faced, you guess, because of the sun. The chico recognises me. "Do I know ...?" Stupid question. The Marítimo. The hotel. He, the chico, is looking on the web. He has a piece of paper in front of him. It's the German's. Marítimo.

"Yes, I know where the Marítimo is. A couple of hundred metres. On the right side of the carretera." I felt embarrassed. The Marítimo's a whacking great edifice, just down the road. The chico didn't know. Why should he? He's only the chico at the petrol station. Maybe he lives in the opposite direction. Never goes that way. Two hundred metres towards Playa de Muro. He can't do them in Spanish, give directions, even were he to know. I can. I can do them in German as well. For the red-faced German. But I do them in English, because I'm being lazy. And it's not my job. He understands well enough. The chico seems relieved and serves someone else. And then she, German, starts to wave her arms around. Broken Spanish. Incomprehensible Spanish. She's red-faced. Maybe all Germans are red-faced. Something about "mercados" and a whole load of stuff that sounds like not markets in houses, whatever this is supposed to mean. Or not, because I, and the chico, haven't a clue what she's going on about. There's a supermarket opposite, says I, in Spanish. The chico nods. No, no, not a supermarket. Would she prefer to do this in English or German? Ah yes. She wants the market. Gotcha. In Alcúdia. I have a map. I am walking information, with my own printed cartographic information. The chico seems relieved. He might have said thank you, I think. I only went in to pay for the petrol.

It shouldn't be necessary. It's all there. Easy. On a mobile. But not yet. Some time. Some time in the future, there will be no difficult questions in petrol stations about hotels and markets. We've seen the future, but it's not here - yet. One day, all this will be different. And what I know will be irrelevant. No one will probably know anything in future. Because they won't need to.


After The Event - World Cup Song
Not quite after the event, because the event hasn't taken place, but long after the event of the whole gig about getting an England World Cup song going because the Fab-ster had pooh-poohed the notion of Rooney doing a Barnesy-style rap (about three months after the event), comes ... . Sorry, Nobby, it's crap. Linekers Bars' World Cup song.

The blog is still fully behind Jess Conrad and "Soccer Superstar" and I feel bound to mention - again - George and the Dragons' "Green Fields Of England", which is only marginally better than - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiWEA5fUjUg

"Express yourselves." - "We want goals." We want Jess.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

We Want Information. Well You Won't Get It

The fiesta season has got out its finest party frock and will celebrate day and night, week in week out into August. Puerto Pollensa started yesterday and overlaps with Alcúdia's Sant Jaume, which gives way to Pollensa's Patrona and this, in turn hands the baton or perhaps the torch of the fire-run to Can Picafort (and Can Pic's fire-run is quite something). It is party, party for the next few weeks, but how much does the average visitor know about all this? Puerto Pollensa and especially Can Picafort benefit from fiestas taking place right slap bang in the centre of town; even without information they are hard to ignore. In Can Pic, you can't move without finding yourself in front of a hotel; two or three in some cases. Fiesta comes to the tourist in Can Pic, not the other way round. Then there are the fiestas in the old towns. Pollensa, one fancies, does quite well in attracting the tourist, partly because Patrona is well-known and partly because of all those villa dwellers who are the sort who might like a bit of local culture more than your regular pool-and-lager brigade. Alcudia, that's a rather different matter.

I have spoken before about information provision for fiestas and fairs, about the money that is lavished on some of the publicity and about the fact that this money and publicity is ill-directed when it comes to the tourist. Take Puerto Pollensa's Verge del Carme week. There is a beautifully produced brochure, 24 pages of thick card, artistically designed and packaged. And not a word of Spanish, German or English. It is vanity and parochial publicity at its worst. Why on Earth do they go to this expense? Pollensa town hall is heavily in debt, so it goes and spends an arm and a leg on some publication that is all but useless for the visitor. Don't let us fall into the trap of saying, ah but this is a fiesta for the local people and so it is right that the material is in their language. There is a sense in which the tourist is discriminated against and denied participation, and this at a time when Mallorca, and therefore its resorts and towns, is seeking to diversify into areas such as cultural tourism. Pay the tourist the right respect, and maybe he will repay this through those sought-after alternative forms of tourism.

They don't need to spend this money on such brochures though. Let's face it, a couple of sheets of photocopied A4 would be quite sufficient; they're promoting events not the creative ability of a graphic designer. Moreover, there is the internet, albeit that Pollensa town hall's website is that useless it falls to the likes of myself to put the information into cyberspace in English.

One of the problems is that the tourist departments in the town halls are out of touch. I accept that it is not they who necessarily are involved in generating the promotional material, but it is they who are in the front-line of communicating with the visitor, supposedly. And don't just take my word for the fact that they are out of touch. I had a conversation with the Alcúdia tourism people the other day, and it was admitted as such. Which brings me, or will, to a whole other area of discussion. And this will be for tomorrow, unless something else gets in the way. Have a nice fiesta.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Wild Man Fischer. And here, if you can stand it, is the "song" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHqR1Rql5r8). For those of you unfamiliar with Larry Fischer, here is also a short docu thing on him - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnHHk9z8iGE. Following the runaway success of Dimple Diamond's "Runaway Train", here is the latest of this blog's strangely big in Mallorca campaigns. Ladies and gentlemen, Wild Man Fischer. Today's title - not a song but a TV programme. Very famous exchange. Where's it from?

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Bits And Pieces

So, even more by way of updates. This time the canal incident and the Beep Romanian row.

Someone came through anon with a comment appended to the piece on 19 May, saying that he or she had seen the car at 6.30 in the morning sticking out of the canal and, moreover, had seen the way the police handled the episode, by essentially letting all and sundry have a good look at what was going on with the forensics. I don't know what that really tells us, but I would guess that elsewhere, let's say the UK, it might have been dealt with a tad more discreetly. Apart from the voyeuristic, the general Joe or Jose Public has no need to be presented with death and an incident of this nature in such a way.

This is the comment in full: "I saw the car sticking out of the canal at 6.30am. I couldn't believe the time it took to get that poor girl out of the canal and how laid back the police were in letting passers-by look in and witness them taking her out and doing forensic tests on her in full view of the public.. It was both shocking and very sad."

And so to the Beep story (14 May). It did occur to me that there might be something more behind that sign than a mere dislike of Romanians. But there was nothing that I read in the press other than the facts of the sign and the resultant hoo-hah. So I'm very grateful to Nicole for pointing out that the shop had had 3000 euros worth of laptop lifted by a couple of Romanians, and that they were caught on camera but had not been tracked down - yet.

Well, I can understand the store owner being somewhat annoyed. When I had the break-in and the expensive camera was lifted, I wasn't exactly overjoyed. But had the police ever discovered who did it and had that person been of eastern European origin (for sake of argument), it would not have made me harbour the view that all people from that area were burglars. The point about the sign was that, by implication, Romanians were being branded thieves or potential thieves. You cannot do that. And if you were allowed to do so, therein would lie the roots of civil disorder to say nothing of sanctioned racism.

But I am doubly grateful to Nicole as it highlights the risk that we all, myself included, take received information either of a biased or a partial nature (and by partial here I mean in the sense of being incomplete) and form a judgement that may not be accurate. We interpret that information to suit our world view, even if some of us strive for a balance rather than seeing merely black or white. But I admit that I read the story and formed a distinct impression. In fact initially I laughed as it was so preposterous, but then I could conceive of only one word - racism. I still hold with that, but to begin with I had acted without the knowledge of some background. Had the fact of the theft been reported at the time, it would not have changed that impression; indeed it may well have hardened it. At least, however, I would have been acting on complete(-ish) or verging towards complete rather than partial information. For what it's worth though, sympathetic as I am to the store-owner in terms of the theft and of his frustration, I cannot excuse him his action.

There is a whole wider issue here, and it is the fact that rarely do any of us know the full story, and yet we make conclusions, utter opinions, become dogmatic with the benefit of only bits or pieces of information or, worse, information that is flawed, prejudiced, one-sided, wrong and sometimes malicious. The sources of this partial information are clear - gossip, embellished gossip, newspapers, television, the Internet. We take this partial, biased or manipulated information because we want to, because it suits our world view, our prejudices. The McCanns were/are a classic example.

And yet, were we to stop and wish to check every bit of information, we would get nowhere. There is an inevitability about human discourse, that it is incomplete. Of course it is. But this is not to say that there shouldn't be some responsibility, and no more so than on the Internet. I can feel a very long thesis coming on, so I shall close, but you've been warned: I might just publish it here.


QUIZ
Chain - Led Zeppelin to "Stairway to Heaven" to Heaven 17 who basically were the British Electric Foundation. Simple. And so how do you get from Heaven 17 to "Papa Was A Rolling Stone"? Dead easy. Today's title - who?

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What's Going On?

Wotzup? Wotz ' appenin'? Wotz t' do?

Things to do, events, fiestas, special days, fairs. There is a lot going on. The editor of "The Bulletin" on their website today makes this point, and he's right. He is also right to point out that getting access to information as to what is going on is not always that easy. This information falls into different categories - that like live music which takes place in bars or clubs and that like the local events and fiestas mostly all of which come under the auspice of the local authorities.

Are visitors generally interested in these sort of events, these fiestas? Are they not more interested in just staying in the bar and spending evenings getting pleasantly pissed? Well some are. Quite a lot are in fact. But quite a lot are interested in these events. Among things that I have something of a business association with is a mobile phone information service that is largely for Thomson (and First Choice) customers. The company that runs this tells me that one of the most important areas of information that they supply is that about events.

It's an interesting discovery and it confirms the fact that people, when on holiday, do want things to do. They are not all just content to stick around the pool, to stay on the beach or to sit all evening in a bar. The demand for excursions backs this up. But the local events are often poorly publicised. I recall saying that my local authority, Muro, appeared to do nothing for those of its residents who live in the beach area of the municipality (as opposed to the town itself) in terms of information provision regarding the main summer fiesta. Even the tourist office had no information until more or less the fiesta week had started. And Muro is not the only offender. Alcúdia and Pollensa can be just as slow, and when they do get information out it is - sometimes - only in Mallorquín. I have translated such information personally and put it onto the websites. It shouldn't have to fall to the likes of myself to do this.

There are people who come to Alcúdia who have no idea that there is a grand fireworks display in the port at the end of the San Pedro week. There are people in Pollensa who have no idea that there is a fair in Alcúdia in October. You almost wonder if the local authorities would rather people stayed away, especially if they are visitors. I'm sure that is not the case, but the information provision could be better and could be made longer in advance than it currently is. In my experience, though the fiestas and fairs normally occupy the same time slots every year, the actual programmes are released at short notice. Maybe they just cannot finalise them earlier, though I find that hard to believe.

The editor asks the local authorities to post this information on websites, and here he raises another interesting point because some of the town hall websites are next to useless. I am still trying to make sense of www.pollensa.com. They do a big job in publicising it, but frankly they're wasting their money. Muro? Forget it. Catalan only. Playa de Muro also has a fair amount of dosh spent on publicising its own site. Fine if you want to book a hotel but no more. Alcúdia, a more switched-on authority than the other two, but it isn't much better. So I guess it will just have to keep falling to the likes of myself to make the information available. It shouldn't be like this.


QUIZ
Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote "You'll Never Walk Alone" ("Carousel") which of course Gerry and the Pacemakers popularised and then the Kop took it up. And so, apart from the Liverpool connection, what do Gerry and the Pacemakers have in common with Frankie Goes To Hollywood? Yesterday's title - Nike. Today's title? Album by?

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