The first thing you learn when you have travelled a bit is that there is absolutely no correlation between how far you travel and how much you learn.
One of the reasons I slightly wince at the middle-class gap year habit is that it is a product of bourgeois distance snobbery. If you are asked at a dinner party "what's young Jolyon up to these days?" it's no good replying that he's working the drive-thru lane at the local Burger King - people will think he's a bit of a loser. But if you reply "Oh, he's travelling" this is automatically an acceptable answer - even though the wretched Jolyon is at that very moment lying on the floor stoned with three English schoolfriends after a night-shift at a Hungry Joe's outside Cairns - where he will learn no more than he would have done back home.
Travel narrows the mind.
If you ever want a really interesting trip, don't bother with Asia. A couple of hours on a plane to Finland is all you need. And it's especially healthy for right-wing people like me because, rather to my discomfort, I find I absolutely love all the Nordic egalitarian paradises. I imagine my resulting confusion must be rather similar to that experienced by a lifelong socialist on finding he really likes Las Vegas).
I'll be writing about Finland more in coming months I hope. But for now let me leave you with just two interesting facts. 1) Traffic fines in Finland are calculated as a percentage of your annual salary. So it has been rumoured that Mikka Hakkinen was recently fined a few hundred thousand Euros for a minor road traffic infringement. 2) In Finland it is rather easy to calculate these fines because...... wait for it..... your salary is a matter of public record.
Yep, you got it. In fact it's even better than that. If you want to know a colleague's annual salary, there's no need to go along to the local post office and fill in a form. No, you just send a text to a short code containing the person's name and address and, a few minutes later, back comes their full annual salary. My Ogilvy colleague out there tells me this realy helps cut down on bullshitting at job interviews. "Now what did you say you were on at Leo Burnett, again.....?"
What is fascinating is the extent to which an idea of privacy varies so greatly from one society to another. Dutch people won't even install downstairs curtains in their homes - as "it seems somehow furtive." Whereas five miles across the border, Germans refuse to fill in census forms.
You can see how much this attitude to privacy varies here in an excellent report by IBM's Institute for Business Value. And it matters to all of us because of what you'll read here in a super Prospect article by the wonderful Peter Bazalgette, and also at the subsequent blog discussion, including a post by me.
In short, what Peter says is something we all know but have never realy fessed up to. Which is that much of the content on the internet is not really paid for in "attention dollars" but in "prrvacy dollars". The way we pay for our Youtube clips or our gmail or whatever is not only with our time, but in the information we (knowingly or not) allow to be collected about us. A country with a particularly paranoid populace (a majority of Germans browse with cookies turned off, for instance*) is therefore reducing the income that can be derived from online content in that market.
This issue may be one people simply choose to ignore. But the scandal aroused by Phorm (not always proportionate, I think) suggests it is one that won't go away.
I also suspect that there is an answer here in the shape of trusted infomediaries. One of the reasons the Finns are so relaxed about marketing data is that it is held by the (trusted) government, and the money generated by it benefits them in the shape of lower taxes. I have a hunch that some highly trusted brands (charities, the Post Office?) may be able to play a role here as guardians of personal data. The name for this kind of body - the infomediary - has been around for about ten years. But it is a concept strangely slow in becoming real.
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* German aversion to cookies may be a product of their obsession with privacy, or just as likely may be a by-product of their appetite for bizarre deviant pornography. I was once staying in Germany and saw a pornographic film (on a free-to-air channel, I add) which started with a bunch of middle-aged couples in walking clothes and stout boots climbing up a hill. This hill-walking went on for about twenty minutes, at which point they suddenly disrobed and engaged in bizarre sexual practices for about ten minutes more. Goretex fetishism, I suppose. Truly the strangest thing I have ever seen.
