JUMPING through hoops

One of the most im­por­tant events of Barcelona’s year re­turned on Feb­ru­ary 28, when the Cata­lan cap­i­tal wel­comed back the Mo­bile World Con­gress (MWC). Until March 3, Barcelona again be­came the cen­tre of the tech world after the pan­demic had led to the event being can­celled for two years. A cut-down ver­sion of the fair took place at the end of June, but even the or­gan­is­ers ad­mit­ted that it was more about keep­ing the ball rolling, as the MWC is con­sid­ered an event that Barcelona can­not af­ford to lose.

As it is, the or­gan­is­ers pre­dict that vis­i­tor num­bers at this lat­est ver­sion of the fair will un­likely ex­ceed half the 109,000 who at­tended the last full MWC in 2019. Nev­er­the­less, the ex­pec­ta­tion is that the fair will have an eco­nomic im­pact for the city of 240 mil­lion euros. The pres­tige that comes with host­ing the world’s fore­most mo­bile tech­nol­ogy fair is also noth­ing to sniff at.

At­tend­ing an event of the mag­ni­tude of the MWC is worth ex­pe­ri­enc­ing, and so when I had the chance to ac­com­pany a jour­nal­ist friend last June, I jumped at it, even if it was a re­duced ver­sion and oth­er­wise I had lit­tle rea­son to be there.

I learnt my les­son about turn­ing down op­por­tu­ni­ties like that back in 1988 when I was still at uni­ver­sity. A friend in­vited me to the con­cert at Wem­b­ley for the 70th birth­day of Nel­son Man­dela (who was still in prison at the time). At first I turned him down; I was short of cash, had exams, and was no fan of Dire Straits or Whit­ney Hous­ton. For­tu­nately, he per­suaded me to go and I got the chance to at­tend a major event (Whit­ney Hous­ton was amaz­ing!).

Any­way, back to the MWC. I went in June and en­joyed wan­der­ing around the var­i­ous stands, tak­ing in demon­stra­tions in­volv­ing holo­grams, ro­bots and drones, and hav­ing a num­ber of eye-open­ing chats with some of the ex­hibitors. Throw in a de­cent lunch at a nearby restau­rant and a few free­bies I picked up along the way and I’d qual­ify the day as a suc­cess.

Yet the ex­pe­ri­ence was not trou­ble-free, and iron­i­cally the prob­lems I en­coun­tered were often tech­nol­ogy re­lated. You can no longer just get a ticket and turn up at an event these days, as there’s a whole se­ries of hoops you have to jump through just to get past the front door.

First you have to go through a multi-step reg­is­tra­tion process on­line and up­load a se­ries of im­ages and doc­u­ments (which in my case in­volved lots of scan­ning and swear­ing). You also have to com­plete a ton of sur­veys about your in­ter­ests and in­ten­tions at the fair that trig­ger a swarm of emails of­fer­ing newslet­ters and in­vi­ta­tions for in­ter­views and talks. The back and forth email­ing is non-stop as you ful­fil a seem­ingly never end­ing se­ries of re­quests. You also have to in­stall a mo­bile app that then sends you more mes­sages and no­ti­fi­ca­tions. All the time you’re told that all of these mes­sages, pass­words, up­load­ing, swip­ing, scan­ning and print­ing is de­signed to make your ex­pe­ri­ence at the MWC as sim­ple and stress-free as pos­si­ble.

Typ­i­cally, when I fi­nally got to the fair after days of on­line prepa­ra­tion, my vir­tual hands-free dig­i­tal pass wouldn’t work. I was told to stand to one side while the rest of the queue made its way through, then the as­sis­tant did all she could to get the au­to­matic bar­rier to open and let me in. She even­tu­ally gave up, man­u­ally opened up a side gate, and with a flick of her head in­di­cated I should pass. I pointed to my bag. I still hadn’t passed it through the heat-map­ping, holo­graphic, x-ray scan­ner. The ex­pres­sion on her face sug­gested that she would make an ex­cep­tion.