What a week!

Is Internet the way to go? Is the Mediterranean sea wet, answers Toni Sant, webmaster at aboutmalta.com. Zillah Bugeja interviews a vegetarian in New York

Since the beginning of 2002 I started a new routine. I am currently on a sabbatical from teaching at New York University, so Monday through Saturday I wake up at about 7:30am, have some coffee, turn on my computer and start reading the 100 or so emails which arrive in my mailbox everyday. The rest of the morning is dedicated to work with my colleagues from the MaltaMedia Online Network. A light vegetarian lunch at about 1pm and by 2pm the second part of my day starts.

I’m currently dedicating four hours every afternoon to prepare my PhD thesis for an official defense sometime later this year. When I was doing my B.A. at the University of Malta I visited the United States as an exchange student and saw that there were great opportunities in this country for anyone wanting to study Communications in a performance context. So I enrolled for an M.A. in Performance Studies at New York University in 1996, which eventually led to my Ph.D. I am writing about how big corporate and commercial interests can limit the Web as we know it into a relatively one-way communication channel. This happened with radio about 75 years ago and there is good reason to believe that it could happen with the Web too.

My evenings start after my vegetarian dinner at about 7pm when I religiously watch The Simpsons. After that I usually relax with my wife Christine either watching a movie or reading a book. Sunday is family day. That’s when I do online video conferencing with my parents, go biking, go to the theatre, visit friends, and keep as far away from work and study as possible. My wife helps me keep on track with all of this while juggling her own carrier as a technology-in-education consultant. She’s amazing!

The website we now call aboutmalta.com was formerly known as Grazio’s Malta Virtwali. Professor Grazio Falzon, a Maltese emigrant who lives in the United States, started this website in 1994 because he was frustrated that there was nothing about Malta on the Internet – the Internet was commercially introduced in Malta in 1995. So, aboutmalta.com is the current incarnation of the first Malta-related website on the Internet.

My role is webmaster, so I’m supposedly responsible for whatever appears on the website, how and where it appears. This is not exactly true since aboutmalta.com operates as part of the MaltaMedia Online Network whose director of operations, Martin Debattista, first approached Grazio Falzon in 1999 to re-organise the website. Several contributing editors help keep the various sections fresh and interesting. And the public has a great role in running and improving aboutmalta.com too.

As part of the MaltaMedia Online Network, aboutmalta.com benefits from all the other partner sites on the network. MaltaMedia’s online news service is still the only independent Internet-based daily news service from and about the Maltese Islands. At aboutmalta.com we offer the latest news headlines from maltamedia.com and an online weather report updated every 15 minutes from MaltaWeather.com – another partner website on the MaltaMedia Online Network. The site’s agenda is to be an online guide for everything about the Maltese islands. This is also why we partnered up with Klabb Kotba Maltin in 2000 to offer Internet users the opportunity to acquire books from and about Malta, wherever they may be. Books.aboutmalta.com is not a major e-commerce concern but rather a cultural service to Maltese publications. This is very in-line with aboutmalta.com’s general philosophy. We do not run the website as a purely commercial entity, even if we do carry some advertising. Our first order of business is to create a sense of online community for people in Malta, Maltese outside Malta, and anyone else interested in the Maltese Islands.

I was originally formally trained to be a broadcaster. In 1988 I studied with the BBC in London and Belfast for several months. Until 1992 I worked as a professional broadcaster, and after that I worked on a freelance basis until a couple of years ago when I chose to switch to working almost exclusively with the Internet.

I feel that the broadcast media situation in Malta is a big joke! In no other country do the major political parties, democratically elected to represent the people, own 100% of their own radio station and television channels. This is one of the reasons I have never been involved with the radio or TV of either of the major Maltese political parties. Also, the so-called pluralism in broadcasting Malta got through the liberation of the airwaves in 1991 has resulted in little more than a multiplicity of mediocrity. There is very little good broadcasting going on, because there are too many untrained broadcasters on the air.

The quality of many, though not all, local productions deserves to be seen only in the Internet, where the technology works on what’s known as an ‘asynchronous pull model’ rather than a ‘prime-time push model’. This is what makes the broadcast media such a powerful propaganda tool for the political parties.

The Internet has many aspects to it. As an Internet user it is best to live in a country where connectivity rates are affordable and fast. As an Internet content producer it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you have direct access to the prime source of the content you put online. Some countries think that they can regulate access to the Internet limiting what people put online and what they can get from it if they go online. This is quite short-sighted, but soon big business interests may be able to do just that thanks to paradoxical legislation which gives them control of what goes through their fiber-optic cables and satellite channels.

People ask me what it’s like to live, study and work in New York. This is a city of extremes. I am an extreme person. This is why I love it so much! I am also quite obsessive and tenacious… sometimes to the point of being perceived as stubborn or even arrogant. This is often frustrating for those around me who believe that they can change someone or something else before they attempt to change themselves.

After the 11 September incidents, many people around me who never thought much about suffering and impermanence now live with these concepts on a daily basis, for better or for worse. I have recorded my most intimate thoughts about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on several audio reports for maltamedia.com – nothing I can tell you here can do justice to what you can hear on those webcasts. Nothing beats face-to-face communication, but in the absence of such intimacy the Internet is unlike any other medium I have worked in. The webcasts are all still available at maltamedia.com and will be for many years to come.