Once the Covid-19 pandemic is well and truly over, the big challenge will be how to once again restore connectivity – the ties... personal and family-based, economic, social and cultural... which previously existed on the basis of face to face encounters. It’s a Maltese, a European, a universal problem.

Not all linkages can be restored to their past state of affairs. Beyond the disconnections caused by the deaths that have been registered, there will be the  impossibility to bring certain personal relationships back to what they were before “normal” communications were interrupted.  Economic and social exchanges will have withered. In the meantime, different action strategies will have been discovered and some past ones completely written off.

Concretely, it will be a difficult task again to trigger the logistical arrangements by which products and persons reached their destinations. For us in Malta, the major challenge will be how to revive as soon as possible the air links with the outside world that we have been promoting for as long as I can tell.

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CHOICES

All EU member states must follow certain criteria when they present projects to access their share of funding in the framework of the European effort intended to launch economic recovery and counter the crisis generated by the pandemic. The main two criteria relate to the objective which carries forward the EU’s commitment to an environmental effort that rolls back climate change and to the other one of promoting digitalisation in the Union.

Yet wrapped in all this, there might be a more fundamental choice to see through. At issue are investment projects – which means that projects are meant to have a long term impact.

So, what should the choices that they raise turn on? Proposals related to physical infrastructures – like machines, cables, tunnels...? Or should they focus on proposals that concern people – like student welfare, teacher training, programmes to improve working methods...?

It’s not so easy to come to a final decision.

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SOCIAL MEDIA AND PRIVACY

I am still astonished at how quick we all have been... practically among all people everywhere... to abandon privacy norms that up to quite recently were considered natural.

Previously what a person would be doing at a particular time of day would be – as a matter of course – that person’s own business. Today you find billions of individuals posting all the time their whereabouts and what they happen to be doing. Private comments that previously used to be made face to face among a few friends, now get published for “all the world” to see. Boundaries between what is private and what is public seem to have been removed.

I do not want to judge whether this is a good or a bad thing, nor wish to do so. However I am not too suprised when the social mood goes sour in short time, since negative comments that till some years ago would have been thoughtlessly passed in private, now get splashed carelessly for all to see and hear.