How can we use technology to make the world a better place? That's one question Channel 4 is grappling with as it tries to plan for an increasingly less broadcast-orientated media world, and also the question this two-day 2gether08 conference wants to start answering.
On the panel: Bill Thompson, technology critic, Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque, author John Naish and Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Arts.
The answer, they think, comes as a result of participation, openness and collaboration.
The new enlightenment
The opening panel set a very high bar for the mission of the next two days - to plan the new enlightenment.
Umair Haque began, saying our agenda should be to rethink capitalism. "If you look at the world, the structures of capitalism are changing really fast because the world has got more interconnected. As that has happened captialism has not been able to keep up, and not been able to create value." We are very good at creating value, he said, but don't look at the other side of that, at the cost of production, and what is good for everybody.
How do we make this happen? We need to organise, and we need to organise around an ideal. Ideals are the most disruptive thing, not business models - and he cited Starbucks, WalMart and Bill Gates as examples of how corporations have built themselves around values, even if those values aren't necessarily ones you agree with.
We need to rethink ourselves
Matthew Taylor said society faces a terrible social aspiration gap. People say they want a future but don't act or behave in a way that makes that future possible. We don't get involved in decision making, are full of our own internal contradictions (like worrying about global warming but flying away on holiday) and transfer all of those contradictions onto politicians, who of course cannot fix them. That kind of thinking has led the government to 'behaviour change' initiatives, but they often seem very superficial because we are not sufficiently selfless or altruistic to the world around us. We are locked in a complex myth of ourselves and our identity.
Matthew Taylor and Umair Haque
Next year's Charles Darwin anniversary will bring many of these issues around evolutionary psychology to the mainstream, said Taylor. Just knowing this stuff is powerful, so we should be shouting about it - and teaching it in schools. Younger people are far more open to change, said Taylor. We need the new collectivist institutions to encourage young people to think of collaboration as something that fits with their lives.
The people who don't stop in a Samaritans scenario are those who say they are too busy; self obsession gets in the way of the hard-wired instinct for empathy. The answer is to order your life in a way that makes space to empathise.
Several things are hard-wired: we are always to optimistic about the future; too pessimistic about how we would react if something bad happened; unreliable about our past life because we always rationalise everything, even our mistakes; and we are burdened with the powerful myth of hyper-individuality. We need to connect the social aspiration gap with this notion of the mythical self.
The biggest challenge in the world is you.
We are infomaniacs
John Naish started by explaining the primitive brain, and how our minds are not equipped to deal with abundance of information. (And this is to a room full of infomaniacs.) Our lower brain makes decisions nano-seconds ahead - and then upper brain justifies it. Our decisions are actually driven by the environment.
Our brains respond to information that is bewildering, confusing or exciting by looking for more information to provide answers. This worked fantastically until Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, so now we are constantly confused and bewildered and constantly seeking new information. That doesn't make us happier.
John Naish
Celebrity culture works because if you show the primitive brain someone enough times, it thinks that you know them. Humans are incredibly good at impersonating, and so we mimic celebrities because we think we will be as successful as them; "I want to be as successful as David Beckham, so I must wear the same underpants." That is why marketing works.
Similarly, we most commonly see pictures of people meditating on posters for mortgages - but we spend so much time working to pay the mortgage that we don't have time to meditate. We are surrounded with icons of the perfect life, but do nothing about having them.
We are in a constant state on continuous partial attention, and it is proven that we do not perform tasks better when we try to multi task. The new challenge is how we deal with all this information, because it won't turn itself off at 9.30 so we can rest. e have to do it ourselves.
"Not only as consumers but as producers we have a moral duty. It's like food - there is nutritious stuff and there is junk. We are in danger of infobesity - more informed than ever but more confused. We have to think about the responsibilities we have when we put information out into the world."
Our champions of change
We're screwed, we're info-obese, we need to overhaul capitalism and we're full of myths about ourselves. No small goals here, then.
Bill Thompson
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