Now there is an interesting juxtapositioning!

In the last two weeks I have been ruminating on the use of social media. We have all seen the effects of social media (especially Facebook and Twitter) on the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. In the last few weeks I have been travelling in North Africa and the Middle East (from Egypt to Turkey - no, not Syria) with my family and one thing that even my teenager noticed and commented upon is that in all the places we visited (from Cairo, to Jerusalem, to rural Turkey) WiFi is seen as a free benefit to customers in shops, cafes, restaurants and hotels. I have not visited the United States for a number of years but here in central Europe you rarely find free Internet access and it is not expected.

I remember a time of no Internet - heck, I remember a time of only black and white TV and just 2 channels in the United Kingdom - but my 14 year old does not remember a time of isolation from Net access. We travel quite a bit within Europe and have become used to paying for access wherever we are (unless I can be persuaded to enter a McDonalds). Therefore, it was a surprise to find ourselves bombarded by free WiFi and Twitter hashtags in what we thought would be isolated non-media aware places.

We were wrong. At times, it seemed that Switzerland - our country of residence and recently announced richest country in the world per capita - was the backward one, when it comes to mass media communication.