Lift10 notes on the Stories Session

Lift10 took place in Geneva from May 5-7. The group of students that won free passes offered by the City of Geneva to participate in Lift are blogging their notes and insights from Lift10...

Anna Jobin talks about the first part of the Stories' session (edited by Sachin Gaur)

Third day of LIFT, Friday morning's Stories' session: three speakers, three different backgrounds, three Stories. A journey from what the technology we have can be used for, to why said technology is not neutral, and back (or rather: forward!) to the question of what to do with what we have got.

On OhmyNews, launched in 2000 by
Yeon-ho Oh as one of the first citizen journalism organizations in the world, citizens are reporters. Every day, about 200 new articles appear on OhmyNews: countless people have written more than 1000 stories and contributed more than 100 top stories. Behind these figures is a passion every conventional newspaper can only dream of. Passion is the key to this participation, but where does it come from? Oh Yeon-ho is clear about it: it comes from the same source where people find passion for citizen participation in general. Whether it is taking part, on a rainy Sunday somewhere in rural Switzerland, in the legislation process of a "Landsgemeinde"... whether it is living in Interlaken and, thus, contributing to the William Tell play for a whole season... writing articles for OhmyNews... at the very beginning is the individual decision of not being a spectator but a direct participant in the process of making our societies better. Is citizen participation always good, and is passion all it takes? At OhmyNews, Oh Yeon-ho is looking for people who participate for what he calls the "right" reason, which is a commitment to the matter (and not the desire for fame). And sometimes, there is need for facilitating the process of turning passion into participation. Taking this role seriously, OhmyNews employs, for instance, many editors who fact-check information, evaluate and redact articles, thus ensuring responsibility, credibility and sustainability. Because responsible, credible and sustainable is what Yeon-ho Oh would like direct participation to be.

The use of technology (OhmyNews) impacting the culture we live in (by facilitating participation).Basile Zimmermann, a China specialist, confirms with a tangible example: the knowledge about the use of strokes in written Chinese risks getting lost somewhere between an English keyboard and a phonetic typing. But the second speaker shows main topic shows the other way of looking at it: how our culture shapes the technology we build and the way we are using it. Because of production history, code is based on the English language. All non-English signs more complicated to use, thus other languages and cultures are discriminated. And the predominance of Western culture does not stop with the issue of coding. Google trying to operate in China with a logo that gives English letters more importance than the Chinese language might be perceived as one more Western company keen on Chinese money - because China has a long history of being exploited for economical reasons. You are not evil? But surely not taking into account the 17 alleged unequal treaties almost all Chinese know... What about a Chinese company, then? The comparison of the popular social network kaizin001 with facebook shows how much privacy issues, advertisement logic and networking attitude differ from what we might be taking for granted. Technology is culture, neutrality does not exist. And with a rapidly growing economy and a huge well-educated population, China will soon be a leader, changing production history. How will technology look on the day it is re-invented by the Chinese to fit their own needs? Not only might the concept of keyboards have changed, but also our legal system, since one of the central questions is how we want to live with technology.

How do we want to live with technology? How do we want to live with what the future holds for us? How do we want the future to be? Well... does it matter? If you ask Jamais Cascio, yes, it does. James Cascio is a futurist and - since we all want to know about the future - he says we are all futurists, too. Futurists can do prediction, which holds the danger of legacy futures: if you have a vision of the future, you hang on to it, because it provides some kind of meaning. They may test strategies: pick one, test how it works in different environments and use the results for scenario planning. Or they can anticipate by making us aware that the future is in our hands. James Cascio chooses to show how much the future is something we can create. As we become more powerful, the impact of our choices becomes more extraordinary. At a moment in history, where the decisions we are making will affect us for centuries to come, we can act and we have a choice, including the choice not to act. Things we are doing matter in the future and we should ask ourselves if we will have been good ancestors. We all have the capacity of foresight and the need to look ahead. Thus, with our sensibility, we are the immune system of our future. And the future is something we create, not something we have. All of our tools are manifestations of our ethics, our culture and of us being human. We can create the future we want. And this knowledge should be shared. Because our lives are long and our planet is unique.

The two "Open Stage" presentations could not be more accurate. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Tinker London hit the mark (or should I say: the red button?) by saying "It's not what you do, it's why you do it" as well as "It is the little details that matter". And Fabian Hemmert, exploring resistance, challenging by himself an entire paradigm when making computers stiff, scratchy and stubborn... Conclusion: amazement, alert, humour and goosebumps throughout the Stories' session. Thank you, contributors. Thank you, Lift.