During the Christmas holidays the only discussion topic at gatherings among friends and meals with relatives was the state of our country. Even more, what really seemed to bother everyone was the continuous dispersion of negative outlooks on behalf of the majority of the country’ s Media.

Obviously things are out of control. It appears as if the Greek state is rapidly deteriorating.

My point is that it doesn’ t pay to overinflate the situation. In short, what’ s the use of terrorizing people through the prime time news or through tragic headlines.

On the contrary, I sincerely believe that a constructive Media, offering solutions instead of mayhem can make a difference.

This country will not become scorched earth. There is talent, will and courage in our people. The country is blessed in a number of ways ranging from climate to physical beauty and agriculture to raw material.

I remember my grandparents’ stories from the German occupation during World War II. There was something present then that has evaporated nowadays. There was hope that it would be over.

Hope can be restored if ‘published opinion’ reduces negative coverage. That would be Agenda-setting for the common good.

It had been a night of music at the Cultural Centre of the University of Indianapolis. The proficiency of the Bios Chamber Orchestra of Athens had bent my imagination at its will, and ran it throughout the bodies of the instruments vibrating in front of me.

Watching the musicians moving from Handel to Vivaldi and Corelli, as well as Biber and Tchaikovsky, I could not but follow each movement of those agile hands in awe. They took my sore soul away with them, far from the crowd that scared me in the morning; when, in front of the National Museum of Greece, I perceived the sharp cacophony between the classical beauty of the building and the drug dealers, addicted, and sellers of stolen items that dwell in front of it. And as I had to zigzag among them in a hurry, they seemed a pond, a sea. I could not reach the end of them; I could not find any empathy in me, afraid and surprised at their number, their relaxed attitude, their being in control of the area.

In recalling the moment, I caught myself thinking that a musical instrument built from wood is a much more alive thing. Affected by humidity and use, as well as temperature, musical instruments are unique as no piece of wood is exactly the same as another, and every type of wood has different properties. As a result, each instrument has its own voice, colour and mood. Ashamed at my strong belief, I secretly admitted that this was so much more than what those people had in them a few hours before.

Lulled by the music, what I had seen rested at a distance in my mind. And so I recalled more of my day; my moving by bus, by taxi and on foot among millions. At one point, I walked towards the metro. There was no metro. I headed for the bus. Once on it, I found the part of the population that strives the most but with dignity, who can not move by taxi, or car, or stay home in a day like this. I listened to their determination, as to the low persistent note of the tough city, until we stopped. Cars jammed the roads: we were stuck in the traffic.

I turned my face to the right and I saw a swarm of women and children in front of a garden’s gate. During the time we stood there, only a window glass in between us, they did not notice me. They were agitated, their bellow filled the air. Looking at them, so rooted in the moment and vibrant, I asked to a lady next to me what they were waiting for.

“Come 18.00 the city distributes food. It is good.” She whispered to me in a sweet islander Greek, and as we moved away, more people gathered in front of the garden’s gate.

Dire is the thought that many children are hungry as well. Only a few hours before, a friend revealed to me that many are those who faint at school due to lack of a proper nutrition. Athens has not seen such a phenomenon from the time it was occupied, more than half a century ago. Fortunately, the Greek State is considering the implementation of a program of basic meals for children of the most deprived districts.

The music took my mind away from all of this again, but the knowledge that Greece is not the only country with such problems is ineradicable. Europe is wiped by an increasing level of unemployment; 23 per cent in Spain, 18 in Greece and 17 in Britain, to mention only a few. This offers little choice and consolation to millions of people: hunger, depression, and misery rule many lives during this winter. Some turn to crime, others to alternative and painful sources of income; those who can not face reality, and have no one close enough to help, contemplates suicide.

Carried away by the notes of Piazzola, and the violin of maestro Halapsis, I also forgot that outside the night was bright and warm, and on the roads of Athens students turn to prostitution to support themselves. They are not alone, it is happening in Britain and in Italy as well.

The concert ended. We all shared the same moment in time, the same intermission. I hardly believe it suggested the same speculations to my peers; we all know that hardship comes in many forms, and each of us shares of it in an original style. Nevertheless, immobile, grabbed by the music someone composed centuries ago, it felt as if we were under a spell long after the music stopped. Our personal voices continued to be silent for a few more moments, suspended, and travelling throughout the centuries, in beauty.

As I reached Monastiraki train station, the rough taste of our existence invaded my throat. Its sound cut right into my rested soul, aggressive. It did not frightened me as in the morning; I felt that others were able to endure much more than this in the past, we will as well.

Photo: Romana Turina

As a result, people try to concentrate on their work, if they have one. Their attention is stubborn, stately focused on a possible future. There still are projects that they want to come to fruition; they still believe that endurance is rewarded with a promising outcome, and this make their sacrifice worthwhile. If a few weeks ago they felt on the threshold of a new era; now most of them have crossed over. They populate an unknown zone in time, a place where politics are not the same they used to be, and politicians cannot follow the rules of the past. This baffles them, and people’s reaction to it comes in different shapes.

On a call in between airports, my friend Maria confessed her shock over the fact that Italy faces the abyss as Greece does. “What has the future in store for our countries?” she asked me. A Greek history professor, but a foreign correspondent by trade, Maria cannot refrain from being deadly dramatic in everything she says. Confident in her understanding, I shared my concern over the sense of contingency that envelops our lives. I nagged a little over the political future of Italy, and adventured myself so far as to state that Greece has never before experienced such a crisis.

There and then, and just as I imagined it, Maria went mute.  “No… wait.” She uttered after a few seconds, and hit me with an interesting take on the current Greek crisis.

“Papandreou played well!” She started off with, but went on asking me if I noticed a pattern resembling a Backgammon game in the recent Greek political events. Puzzled as I was, Maria didn’t take long to understand that I don’t play the board game.

Happy to solve what for me was nothing but a riddle, she started lecturing as she waited for her suitcase in Rome. Backgammon, or Tavli as commonly known by the Greeks, is based on philosophy. Its beauty can be found in the grand design hidden into its board.  The wooden plank where the battle takes place represents one year, and each side of it twelve months; the twenty-four points on it are the hours in a day, and the thirty checkers represent the day in a month. Finally, the sum of the opposing sides of the die represent the seven days of the week, and the contrasting colours stand for night and day. The winner is always the one able to hold on to the end of the game, no matter what the opponent might throw along the way. “It is just like life.” She concluded.

I started to see what Maria implied; George Papandreou’s ability to endure, and play on the very difficult Greek political board, reminded her of the cunning of a Backgammon player. She stressed that from a strategic point of view what happened in Greece is good: the lame political routine made of micro politics, that finds a justification only in the desire of certain politicians to gain power taking advantage of a crisis, has now lost its larky flavor. Therefore, due to the seriousness of the situation, obsolete political practices have either to be put aside or to adjust to new rules. “Papandreou found a way to bend them all. It’s the Greek old way” she stated.

I admit that I did not see eye to eye with this interpretation at first; to me the never changing rules of Backgammon could hardly offer an inspiration for a new political routine in Greece. Nevertheless, I soon found myself mulling over it: “extreme measure for extreme political weather has been taken. It was a matter of nerves and strategy enacted to win the war, not a battle.”

Is Greece a country born out of extreme political strategies?  Maybe, maybe not; but the hardness of the game made me shiver.

As a child, I saw stories of kings and queens unfolding in front of my eyes on the chess board: some of them lived, some died; in the end nothing really mattered, it was only a game. In this case it is a country, and real people. Greece had to reach the point of ‘check mate’ to see everybody’s attention focused; to force them to take responsibility over what they can deliver.

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”, writes Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) in the The Leopard (1963).  Is this the kind of manoeuvrings Mr. Papandreou had to pull to finally see some capable people working together for Greece?  Maria seems to be sure about it; I am keen on thinking she is right.

Then, the worse of me gets the upper hand and I recall Lampedusa, again: “We were the leopards, the lions, those who take our place will be jackals and sheep, and the whole lot of us – leopards, lions, jackals and sheep – will continue to think ourselves the salt of the earth.” He spoke about politicians.

One of these mornings, I found myself in a train filled with men traveling in mass to reach Syntagma square. They talked about how they wished to walk in front of the Parliament to state they are tired, that they worry for the future of their families.

As I snapped out of my little worries, there in the train, I became aware I was the only woman among them. I felt slightly intimidated, and grew more and more alert. Imagine my surprise when I saw my next-door neighbour, a senior Greek citizen who owns a small bookshop in Monastiraki, picking out of his pocket a slim parcel, open it in front of his friend, and reveal nicely cut slices of pastourmas. There was a sparkle in his eyes as he uttered: “Just in case we get hungry. You know, up there in Syntagma”.

In front of the innate humanity of this man’s gesture, I relaxed and started to observe the people around me, to listen to them. Behind me, a group of friends was planning to drink a good Greek coffee at the Café before walking to the square; further on, another man was laughing. To the rear, some were literately chanting songs one might hear during pleasant social occasions. I couldn’t but realize that these men were grandfathers, and fathers, and middle aged men, and teenagers with a bright smile. They were all heading for a walk that made them feel important. They looked necked to my eyes, well aware of the other kind of people they might meet in Syntagma.

Busy as one is in order to go along with a normal routine while showered by all the difficulties several strikes force upon us, I soon forgot the morning encounter. In the afternoon, as I travelled on foot from one place to another among the beautiful buildings of Plaka, I met other people. Those whose emotions had transformed into somehow enlisted people;  women and men I surpassed, and were all looking at a point in the distance. They seemed not aware of anything but of the route they followed, mechanically. Hanged on their neck were different models of  gas masks, some of their faces covered in a white paste, and behind them fires and thick black smoke.

As I walked among them, I instinctively moved closer to the building to my right and hunched my shoulders, as a cat does in trying to pass by unseen. Before I knew it, my move revealed itself correct: in front of me there were others. These did not seem to be people; fury and irrationality prevailed, while stones were thrown at what I believe was the police, and more rubbish bins were set on fire. Then, I realized I was wrong. Those stones were not for the police, but for other fellow citizens trying to keep the situation as calm as possible.

As the night set in, those who remained in town were either obliged to work, or in need to give voice to their emotions not peacefully. When I left the office, I found my way out of  Syntagma square. I pushed ahead as fast as I could, I needed to reach the car that was waiting for me in a safe street. I knew that a third kind of crowd had moved down toward Monastiraki, in a feast of violence. I feared them, those under the effects of anarchy’s fumes to whom rationality means nothing.

In front of me, around me, ashes and tear gas still active in the air, disheveled cobblestones and crashed plant vases, burnt rubbish bins and missing iron bars. The thoughts of smashed window’s crystals and the image of my Greek neighbour in the train fused in my mind. The small shop he did not close once in thirty-seven years to go on a holiday might not be there in the morning.

My way to the car was so quiet, such a new experience in a still warm Greek night when people used to be out and about. I went along. Between the buildings only some quick walking figures, citizens like me who tried to go home; most of us lodging far from the centre of the capital. Walking, while my eyes, nose and throat hurt more than I had imagined, there were but questions in mind. What would have those breaking the shop’s windows to say to the shop’s owner? What exactly democratic they see in a night of rage in town, which offers nothing but the annihilation of other people’s hard work? How can a citizen throw a stone to another today, when everybody is in trouble? How can a State be if everybody thinks but for himself?

My day was not over. In the night I had to travel toward Piraeus. There the atmosphere was peaceful and somehow cheerful. The home ground of Olympiacos football team, Karaiskakis Stadium was lit and filled with passionate people. The Champions League match Olympiakos – Dortmund was on. I liked to imagine my next-door friend had eaten his pastourmas in Syntagma, and was watching the match as I passed by; that he was safe, as safe should had been his shop.

Suddenly, a found myself asking what democracy looks like. To me it seemed about the rights to open your own shop, intact; it was on the faces of those smiling proud people walking peacefully, and on those working, no matter what, because democracy is about duties as much as rights. It is also about a policeman I know, who was recently put on reduced pay, and works as a bartender in his spare time; and those who go to teach despite the chaos around them, because young people need to learn that a sense of responsibility starts on the job one does.

Correct me if I am wrong, but pondering over Democracy today, my mind goes to some words of Alexandros Panagoulis I found in a book purchased in my Greek neighbour’s shop.  I am a romantic, and I would like to quote them here: ‘Let us weight every actions we see in life with our intellect, and let thinking be the guide and the spirit of our actions. [...] Let thought lead without passions to create hates.’ (Other will follow. Palermo: Flaccovio Editore, 1972).

Nobody can hide from the social unrest present in many countries, the malady is not limited to Greece; people do not believe what governments say, are dragged left and right by political groups trying to win votes, and continue to look for answers with the clear feeling they will find few, or none. There are plenty of economic analyses where the explanation often coagulates around the word ‘corporation’; but there is also something else we could recall as people feel more and more alone; Das Narren Schiff (Ship of Fools) written by Sebastian Brant in 1494.

Notable for including the first commissioned work by artist-engraver Albrecht Dürer, the Ship of Fools is a collection of satires. Much of Brant’s work was critical of the current weaknesses and vices of his time, and today it turns up as a good example of critique against Governments, Churches and politicians.

Fools as we might feel today, and in spite of the digital revolution we witness, no satire can reach and hit any contemporary courts. In the mean time those who try to safe Europe, and Greece, report the raise of homeless people on the roads of Europe, and Athens. How not to recall that crazy people where confined into ships, and exiled from villages, in Medieval times? Certainly this is too absurd, and it will never be possible nowadays… Still, it might be the time to stop acting as coarse people do, look into the eyes of the fool we hide inside of us, and check our lonely truth: maybe we can do something before we become the seniors who hit the kindergartens.

But what about the traditional brick and mortar? What about companies, establishments, groups of people whose days pass with more tangible work, away from entertainment screens and lazy browsing?

These are people who wished they had time to engage more actively online, but at the same time they are unwilling to spend their time in ‘Farmville’, milking cows or running imagery errands.

Most of what we once called white collar job positions are now internet oriented, minus the collar. Especially when the crisis calls for a reorganization of priorities and a restructuring of the production paradigm. Not to mention the advanced communication techniques corporations will be called to come up with when growth starts knocking at the door.

Is this far away? Even in Greece, the turning point is not that far away. In fact, it is nearer than most people think. And when it comes, positioning in the Attention Economy will become top priority for corporations that have gracefully survived the rough times.

Repositioning the company is one thing; redefining the idea behind the company is something different. Both, however, are directed related to the new platform convergence of content, computing and telecoms has produced in the last fifteen years.

Corporate associations and leading company groups need to reassign resources to accommodate the need to integrate their messaging systems.

It is now commonly argued that the corporate website has become the most valuable medium an organization has, even if the organization spends tens of millions on advertising, promotions and other media.

This is because the web is becoming the primary driver for company’s communications.

In really large companies, the formation of a group of web specialists within the company premises will soon turn to be an absolute necessity. The deconstruction of the media industry allows corporations to appear picky and satisfy all of their needs for content handlers, specialists and technological resources. The end-game would be the creation of a corporate web department, responsible for company information design, that will provide total editorial support, as well as programming and administration of the information flow. Also, explore more particular tasks, like soc-nets campaigns and blog activity.

The traditional approach of a corporate environment that allows communication to run in parallel or some times conflictual way is coming to an end.

The future will untangle the corporate web, sort out the target audiences, explore the particularities of the stakeholders, develop intranet knowledge and will embark from a new scheme.

These days, established media are going through a tremendous crisis, that is altering their core operation. Things will never be the same again. Many outlets will disappear completely, amidst an era of extensive debt, falling revenues and scandalous relationships between vested interests and content handlers.

Channels and carriers of information and communication policy messages are subject to change. We are already moving away from the traditional source – relationship towards what many would call ‘the terra incognita’ of the soc-nets and multimedia press releases.

In the digital era, old dogs will not be obliged to learn new tricks. They will simple die. New techniques, tools and online strategies will explore the new potential of user-driven social media, strategizing on multi-dimensional messaging and its effect not as a key priority for the future, but as an urgent necessity of the present; no matter how hesitant corporate decision-makers may appear to be.

Deep inside, CEOs know that the world is changing and companies should do their best to remain close to citizens and their digital voices.

What is also undeniably true is that in the new era of entrepreneurship that will emerge from the crisis, corporations will be much more than volume of sales and profits. Their existence will rely on their ability to communicate successfully and persuade people for their social significance.

The digital approach to corporate necessities, either this is a new marketing campaign, a social responsibility strategy, or a company’s need for internal coherence and peace will turn out to be an absolute must. What is most interesting, is that this will occur much sooner than expected.