Rafting down a Swedish river “Klarälven” with four grandchildren July 2021
Report 2021
As for many others also my 2021 has been a year in the sign of Corona. Scheduled meetings and seminars have been canceled or changed to online events. Interestingly enough it has – beside many drawbacks – opened up for participating in “meetings” on a much larger scale, both concerning the number of participants and geography. In my sphere of interests, I have followed online seminars provided by international organisations and national institutions from all corners of the world. I miss though the personal contacts for instance with media researchers at the annual conferences of RIPE@ and EMMA. Also, because they have during the last twenty years provided a welcomed collegial push and valuable inspiration to much of my writing on media development. As can be seen from my list of publications (see>>here), I haven’t published anything this year. I can’t blame that on cancelled conferences. Rather it’s a consequence of my yearlong work with studying the policy-formation leading up to the Danish media political settlement in parliament (2018).
This work has over the last couple of years led me to zooming out to a broader theme. Together with senior (i.e. retired) colleagues at the Department of Political Science, Copenhagen University, I have participated in a project, “The Bermuda Triangle between Politics, Public administration and Media”, studying why and how the interplay of groups of actors in the three corners of the triangle seems to have a mutually negative effect on how policies are created, decided upon and implemented. We have had a number of interviews with members of the Parliament, civil servants from “the White Hall” of Denmark and editors from media and also gathered them to confidential round table talks. Here there seems to be a fairly broad consensus that the actors in each of the three groups might be acting rationally from their own perspective. They are, however, locked into roles and behavioral patterns, which taken together seems rather dysfunctional. Where this project will lead us, I really don’t know. Reaching out to other groups working with more or less the same ideas, we are writing discussion papers and planning a number of seminars. Enjoying the privilege of being totally independent without any formal commitment our engagement is based upon pure curiosity and – to be honest – also an ambition to leave a tiny fingerprint on the changes, which hopefully will emerge in coming years.
My family life was also affected by the corona situation. In the first half of the year, we moved social gatherings out into the garden with open fire and heat lamp. We discovered new, exciting parts of Denmark through countless hikes. But we had to give up planned mountain trekking in Norway with the ten grandchildren. Instead, it turned into hiking and canoeing in southern Sweden. With the four eldest (13-17 years) we went on a raft down the Klarälven (a rather large river also in Sweden), which became more challenging than it seems in the picture above. During all the previous years' mountain trips with grandchildren, my wife, Mai and I have met a certain respect for the fact that we took the children with us in the mountains and under such stressful conditions could keep track of them. This year, on the raft trip, it was almost the other way around. "How nice that you have children like that who can help you old people up from the armchairs and out into the open and take such good care of you," said people we met. In fact, we have never kept it hidden that this was exactly the long-term plan. When our legs and back can no longer handle the heavy backpacks, we need / will need young and strong forces to take care of us. That’s a time approaching everyone at our age.