Silence of the lobbyists

Ground Zero for the EU lobby

Why PR people are so annoying

Phone rings, “Hello. I’m Shiny Person from mumble and we represent mumble.”

How the heart sinks because some useless idiot has decided to add their pointless nonsense to our lives. No decent human being has anything but contempt for PR people. If they had any worth or ability, or what used to be called, gumption, they would do something on their own terms.

Instead, they sell their bodies to tell lies, mistruths and the myriad of deceptions asked by their corporate clients whose combined intellect couldn’t match a reasonably stocked whelk stall. I return, they get to bask in the reflected glory and pretend they’re even slightly important.

It doesn’t last which is why these companies have a turnover faster than a Libyan people smuggler.

This is how it works and why it is so stupid. Company wants to be seen in Brussels so hires a PR firm, who get the job by over promising on everything. Company wants an event, PR firm organises. Then Chair – or increasingly President, decides the media need to hear the blessings of his golden mind and voice. The PR have promised X amounts of briefings with Y amount of journalists.

So the invites go out and clog up hacks inboxes, for a brief moment of life before they get deleted.
Faced with the fact that an understaffed and overloaded press corps is uninterested in an event (Say a global conference held on May election day for example, that level of incompetent organisation) that has nobody of any note talking about nothing of any import, there’s only one thing to do.

So, the PR underlings then start hitting the phones. Its funny how they always mumble who they are and work for, so we get them to enunciate and they move on to their question, the point of it all: ‘Did you receive our email?’

The honest answer is that nobody knows or cares. Faced with this disinterest the PR – either someone on the firm’s naughty step or the gimp of modern life, an intern – ploughs on regardless.

Sometimes they foolishly try to engage our enthusiasm, “There’s be some MEPs there, I can set you up with an interview” not realising that journalists can sort that out without bringing in a PR company, or there’s the “President of the European association of associations of European Whatsit producers” who is wafting their way towards the holy land of some hotel with two more stars than it deserves and a buffet that would benefit from the addition of soylent green.

So, because a common sense-challenged company was told a pile of rubbish by an overly-needy PR firm, the end result is to annoy as many journalists as possible in order to save their own jobs.

That’s the generous interpretation, the other is that they are so cosmically dense that light curves around them and believe that their event has such an obvious news value that journalists will cast bread and salt over them for alerting them to an unmissable event.

The kind thing to do is to help them all break out of this downward spiral of co-dependency and put the phone down.

Shooting them would be more humane though.

World shut your mouth

Swap your iPhone to a Why phone

Hang up on smartphones and talk to actual people

Remember the opening scene in the classic science fiction film, 2001 A Space Odyssey?  Where the ape ancestors find that some bugger’s dumped a large black monolith outside their home while they were asleep, driving them to violence and murder.

That’s roughly how I feel about my new smart phone.

The damn thing insists on speaking to me and appears to know what I’m up to, or intending before I do. It’s like being stalked by HAL 9000, and that really didn’t end particularly well.

I used to have a phone that was black plastic and sat on a desk in our family home. No matter what happened, we never lost it. There was some sort of revolution in telephones, but I’m not sure exactly, you see I was either in the notorious radio black spot of the English mountains, where a signal was even less common than sunlight, or in Africa.

Then, on arrival in Brussels, I was given an oblong piece of ugly plastic and I formally joined the modern world. This phone wasn’t smart, even by the standards of the day, but I soon learned to misspell text messages and dial the wrong number.

But it did mean that I was connected, in the grid, contactable. Like many modern ideas, it sounds rather good on paper, but it was, like so much of modernity, rubbish.

It is no coincidence that, looking back over my life, that my happiest times were when a phone would have been about as useful as a copy of the ‘Gordon Brown Guide to Smiling.’ Who needs a phone if you’re enjoying yourself? Who needs one if you’re doing something interesting?

You see, there’s one tiny issue. I don’t want to be contactable by humanity; I want to be left in peace and quiet.

Instead I’ve got a phone that talks to me. This I can accept, we live in a world where cars lecture us about our habits in a variety of grating voices, but this phone initiates conversations. That’s a step too far. Perhaps they’ve evolved past consciousness to compulsive neediness, like a reality show contestant, or Geri Haliwell.

The phone also ‘engages you with your globally interconnected world’. Basically, this means that I can use Twitter (a way of communicating with people you don’t really want to meet) and Facebook (a way of communicating with friends you don’t really want to meet).

The end result can be seen all around, as groups of young folk, with their lives ahead of them, gather in public and… whip out their phones and type away, hardly sparing a glance, much less a word, with the people they’re ‘socialising’ with.

Thus our devices disconnect us from real human contact. We’ll be dreaming of electric sheep next. Then the fun really starts.

This is the beginning of our brave new world, where we are connected to everything, but in touch with nothing human.

The phenomenon has also been described in a book, Bowling Alone, published in 2000, from an original essay from 1995, after the author noticed a decline in the number of bowling clubs in the US. Starting off by considering this a change in leisure activity, the author, Robert Putman, discovered that there was a widespread decline in people’s involvement in community groups, and more worryingly, political interaction.

That’s our future, typing mindlessly on our phones while our politicians tell us that Rome is not on fire.