Iceland review - 2013, Síða 6

4 ICELAND REVIEW
“The difference between a novelist and a historian is
this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the
fun of it; the historian tells lies and imagines he is
telling the truth.” – Halldór Laxness
the world is getting smaller. Half a century ago,
Iceland was still on the edge of being a mod-
ern society. Today, we live in the global village.
Iceland is connected to almost 50 cities by 19 air-
lines, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
The smart phone revolution makes the world even
smaller, bringing us all closer, much closer together.
Where we are doesn’t matter anymore. As 15-year-
old businessman Starri Steindórsson, who lives in
Akureyri, puts it so well in an interview on page 14:
“I reach my targeted Hong Kong customers
through direct advertising on Facebook, where they
order the fish of the day … the customers have no
clue that I’m working in a different time zone, on a
different continent in a small town in North Ice-
land.”
One thing the latest technology cannot transfer is
the wind, the rain and the great outdoors of Iceland.
You have to come here and feel them and enjoy the
endless daylight of summer.
As an unnamed Dane, who came to make the first
meteorological observations in Iceland in 1749, re-
marked: “Here is endless Danish November. What
makes the seasons differ in Iceland is not the tem-
perature, it’s the light. ”
And the summer light is perfect to show Iceland in
the right light. With thousands of variations of green.
Not to mention the hundreds of shades of blue, rang-
ing from grayish to dark blue. And at the same mo-
ment you freeze the moment on your mobile, the
picture of a windswept Icelandic mountain appears
on someone else’s screen in Oslo, Ouagadougou, or
Osaka. The recipients admire the mountain, but have
no idea that Iceland just got a new government, see
page 78, or how to invest in Iceland, as we tell you all
about on page 95.
On page 50 we go back 50 years to show Iceland in
black and white. The way it was. True history? No
clue.
Páll Stefánsson
ps@icelandreview.com
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EDITOR
Páll Stefánsson
DEPUTY AND
fEATUREs EDITORs
Ásta Andrésdóttir (on leave)
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PRODUCTION
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