it's hard to think of all that has happened yesterday when yesterday's second to the last speaker is reverberating through your head. i'm absolutely impressed with the quality of speakers and the diversity of ideas. there is one theme that seems to be more prevalent than most...

we need to build ecologies, not systems.

speaker by speaker we have been introduced to the ubiquity of data, communication methods and it's impact to everything around us. most importantly, many of yesterday's coversations focused on the envroment, and how we don't take physical impact into consideration. rarely, before today, have i ever heard the concept of the physical world discussed in such dire and unforgettable ways.

lee bryant's morning presentation spoke on ways we need to rethink our intelligence inside the enterprise. while he waxed on collective intelligence, his statement "we need to feed our minds, not our machines..." stood out. from my personal view point he is correct, we have entered a point were our focus is too much on products and not on practice. after lunch, sugata mitra extendisng this concept when he spoke on reengineering primary education. he focused on peer education and how children from small improvised towns across india, cambodia, and south africa can teach them self to learn new languages and technology.

after lunch, julian bleecker spoke susinctly on his research on the affects of second life on our first life. mind you this is just surface research... we are now living in a world where our desire to participate in a "second life" has highly expensive, and non-sustainable costs. best quote - "there is no way to reboot our first life if it crashes..."

BUT that doesn't mean we should stop...

mr. bleecker's comments were mirrored in a similar presination by Suren Erkman and Paola Chillani who solely focused their conversations on sustanable develoment. both reiterated the fact, we must start thinking of everything as an ecosystem. slide after slide and from two different vantage points - humanity and industry - we see the systemic fallacy of our consumption. no penguins army here... just plain thought into how we can increase efficiency and design a better world at the same time.

then, my brain exploded. i had lunch with Ben Cerveny and he mentioned that his presentation would be on metaphors, but little did i know that his presentation would be the keystone of all other conversations. eloquently, mr. cerveny linked every digital action to a biological term. through this synthesis of actions, we have shaped information to be the proteins of the digital age.

these proteins, like in biology, are the building blocks of life... it's hard for me to even attempt to be so eloquent as mr. cerveny. needless to say, the world we live in now is like a school of fish, and as mr. cerveny reiterated "a fish does not know what the school looks like..."

that's day one of lift!

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Technorati Tags: ben cerveny, hole in the wall experiment, Julian Bleecker, Lee Bryant, lift conference, lift07, Paola Ghillani
Paola Ghillani, digital ecology, second life, Sugata Mitra, Suren Erkman, sustainable development, technology, web 2.0

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