Calling the Arctic
One of the best examples of citizen-journalism is the 27 year old Portuge American ‘Byciclemark’, who lives in Amsterdam. After reading an interview with him on Sargasso, and a blogpost on the artic, I dropped him a line. Now I think there is a rather big difference between journalism and “˜concerned citizenship”™, and in fact working as a journalist kind of strips you from everything you were concerned about before. But Mark works on the edge of both, he produces wonderful podcasts and maintains a blog that is well worth reading.
In his last podcast, we spoke a little bit about the Arctic. I explained a few things on Arthur Chilingarov, the arctic researcher and parliamentarian that received a Yuri-Gagarin alike welcome upon return from flag-planting mission on the Northpole. You can listen to it here.
Mark asked a couple of questions that made me realise in what a strange paradox this country is caught. On the one hand nobody gives a dime for the Arctic, or basically anything that happens outside of their datcha. On the other hand, everybody loves it. Just ask a random person on the street, if they know about it, they will for sure tell you that they support Russia”™s enterprise to the Artic. Same goes in many ways; nobody cares too much about politics, but Vladimir Vladimirovich enjoys a constant popularity of around 70 percent.
