LIFT08: Social messengers and the permeability of virtual-real

(Running notes from the LIFT08 conference in Geneva - Conference blog.)

Science-fiction writer (and cyberpunk guru) Bruce Sterling opens the morning with a personal "state of the world" address, which was supposed to be overview of what happened in the last year that struck him as pertinent or interesting. Instead, after predicting that 2008 will be "a crappy year", he goes off on a riff about Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the new first lady of France, calling her a "black swan" (an unexpected but major event), predicting ("40% chances") that the romance will end in tears. Funny and entertaining, Bruce is a fabulous writer and storyteller, but this time he annoyingly stretched the conference's boundaries.

Up comes Pierre Bellanger, CEO and founder of french media group Skyrock -- and its twin blog and social-networking platform Skyrock Networks. Talks about social networks. Skyrock started as a pirate radio at the end of the 1970s (there was a state monopoly at the time in France). Today, 3.7 million listeners a day, and a hugely popular French-language blog platform. He talks about the "netamorphosis" (Net + metamorphosis) that Skyrock will have to go through in the coming years, transforming itself to adapt to new realities.
Running notes: Let's start with the mother of all social networks: e-mail. That's at the core of what we do. Social networking is to e-mail what search is to the web: it's a new level of metadata about people.
Social networks are offering relational productivity. When you're a teenager, you're extremely productive. Your time counts, and you're managing many contacts, the emotional depth you put in those relations is extremely important. Working with that generation helped us create a software that takes into account the true nature of those relations and of your digital identity. Your social networking profile becomes the center of all your electronic exchanges, using any channel. In networks, value is shifting from bandwidth to code. The value of telecom is being transferred from network exploitation to software that handles and exchanges information. That code is going to be tomorrow's social network.
To realize this vision we have to think about the mobile phone, evolving into a pocket-size Internet terminal, permanently connected. Physical identity merges with digital identity, because both are now at the same place at the same time.
What's the software bridge between social networking and mobile terminals? We will work with instant messenger, which will be the crossroad of all exchanges (BG: Swisscom has understood that a while ago with the wildly successful Ogo), will become a social messenger that lets you synch with your network of friends permanently, a social operating system. The mobile device links you permanently to the Internet. Small wins: the small device will be the main device to access the network. So telecom operators will try to control that social operating system, that interface.
Future: no longer PCs nor mobile devices, but plenty of servers -- because all those machines will have the power of a server. And that changes the game. If every mobile devices, on top of being a phone is also a mobile servers you can have mobile cloud computing, distributing tasks. In this scenario the traditional server farms belong an aggregation of devices belonging to the public at large. Next stage: wireless mesh network. Terminal and distant server will merge, PC and mobile software will merge. And because the small wins over the big, it's probably the mobile OS that will be dominant in the future.

Jonathan Cabiria specializes in the field of positive psychology and talks about how participation in virtual worlds affect real life. His focus is on marginalized people, people who don't feel they belong. What do they do? They either rebel or hyperidentify themselves (tattoos, aggressivity, etc) or become depressed, close in. And this suppression of their identity has psychological effects. He studied relationships in virtual environments such as Second Life. What happened to a large number of these people: they did a complete turnaround, by being in the virtual worlds they were able to bring out these facets of their identities that had been repressed, and explore then in a safe harbor, an environment that allowed them to do so. They became stronger, their self-esteem got higher, they felt that they belonged, found a community of peers, and -- what Cabiria didn't anticipate -- this transferred out into real life. So we're looking at a strange juxtaposition between virtual world and real world. Some of the participants have said they felt more authentic in the virtual world and more phony in the real world. The other finding was that the permeability of this artificial membrane that we create in our language between real world and virtual world: why do we keep dividing them? They're parts of the same thing, "one life" (BG: which echoes what Bellanger said before physical and digital merge).

Closing the session, two "open stage" presentations: short speeches that were proposed by the attendees, and voted in by the attendees (through a pre-conference online poll).

Stephanie Booth, a Swiss freelance web-consultant and commentator, talks about "going solo", which is what she did (leaving her teaching job to turn her blogging passion into her full-time activity) but also the name of her upcoming conference, Going Solo, which will take place in Lausanne on May 16, exploring the difficulties freelances encounter and offering responses.

Ewan McIntosh discusses social media and education, describing a study on what makes the best schools the best (answer: teachers) and a follow-up experiment in a school district in East Lothian, Scotland, "trying to bring schools into the 21st century", to close the gap between teachers and the "Bebo-boomer generation" (Bebo is a very popular UK online social network). They made teachers blog, do podcasts, etc, involving the entire community to create the guidelines for the experiment and so on. Brilliant.

Comments

[Stephanie Booth]

Little typo: there's an "o" missing in my name! Thanks for mentioning my speech :-)

[BG]

Sorry, stream-of-consciousness blogging creates this kind of mistakes. Corrected.

[Stephanie Booth]

No need to be sorry -- I know exactly how this kind of things happens. You're doing a way better job liveblogging today than I am, by the way. I'm wiped out.

[Stephanie Booth]

Just a note to let you (and your readers) know that registration for Going Solo is now open :-) (click the link on my name)

[Ewan McIntosh]

And I thought I was fast at stream-of-consciousness blogging ;-) Thanks for the mention and kind words. On my return home I'm glad to see that the Head of Education we got blogging has just been promoted to the Director of Children's Services. Soon we'll have every echelon of local government working better with their communities!