For years, in the "North-West" (that is industrialized countries - usually understood as North vs. South and West vs. East), we've been babbling about the "digital gap" that is supposedly the new line of division, usually understood as running along that of economical and political development. We often have quite a simplistic idea of the situation, imagining countries that are like technological deserts, on top of being devoid of everything essentials for a normal life (that is one car per family, two TV-sets per household, all with at least 40 channels, and 4-weeks vacations in the Bahamas or in the Swiss Alps per years). We tend to forget the forest of satellite dishes that are ornementing most cities and even village buildings in what we used (politcally) incorrectly call "third world" countries. And a recent article from the Mail & Guardian, translated in French in the Courrier International, just reminds us how wrong we often are about the appropriation of "our" modern technologies by people in these countries.

A recent somewhat shocking experience with the Web 2.0, in which I really lost control of my image (fortunately, the content isn't damaging for my reputation, but still) has inspired me the following thoughts. I'm posting them today as I was invited to a seminar by Dynamia about the safety of one's digital personal data (in French only), which was temporarily postponed. But I hope this can serve as a starting point for deeper reflexions that could be elaborated on in such gathering.

The metaphor of the "Global Village" has now been offering for more than 40 years a vision of a sort of "flat world", with no barriers, where people can meet peacefully and communicate seamlessly. Based on an idealistic conception of the village community (I live in a village, so I know what I'm talking about), this expression tends to completely oversee some less charming aspects of this way of life. Among them, I'd like to particularly point community's gaze, gossips, neighbor's malevolence. Moreover, the adjective "global", while giving us the illusion of being connected to the rest of world, makes us then forget that we are unfortunately first and foremost rooted in the local, made of family, friends, colleagues or fellow students. This results in us loosing some sense of discretion if not decency when we are active online. And I'm not talking about puritanism or prudishness here, but about protecting one's personal sphere.

On behalf of all the free-pass students who attended LIFT'08 through the Gerbert Rüf Stiftung (GRS) fellowship program, I would like to express our sincerest gratitude to the GRS foundation for offering us this unique opportunity. This event wasn't only an eye-opening experience, allowing us to expand our takes on familiar issues and our intellectual horizons on less familiar ones. It also gave us the chance to meet with both academic researchers and industry professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds.

For some of us, these encounters might have a future life-changing impact on our scholar or career paths. For others, the knowledge acquired during the presentations and encounters made during the breaks and meals will help them to successfully carry on their projects, whether in the academia or in the realm of business. But beyond this, we all felt our world views and assumptions about the role of technologies in society challenged in a constructive and positive way. We also got to confront our insights gained in classes with those resulting from professional experiences in discussions with people involved in the industry.

Blogging (almost) live from the conference was another quite engaging and exciting part of our participation in LIFT'08. We not only enjoyed experiencing a new form of "journalism", but also trying out our hands on technologies and community platforms we were not all accustomed to. This forced us to actively reflect on the ideas, discourses and forecasts about the socio-technical evolution of information and communication, instead of simply sitting there and waiting for the words to sip in. Our posts got feedbacks, both in written form, directly on the LIFT blog community site, or in encounters with people we often didn't know at all. This generated very interesting conversations and ideas for potential project collaborations.

I would also like to thank the organizers of this Conference for their amazing work. This event was just the best I have been to in a long time. Not withstanding some difficulties with the Internet connection, which I believe isn't the responsibility of the organizers but of CICG, LIFT'08 truly lifted my spirits and stimulated my thinking. I had been stuck home for two months, almost never living my "study cave", interacting only with my books and computers, so LIFT came at the absolut right moment for me, as it allowed me to get out, not only of my appartment, but also my general thinking frame to confront my recent reflexions with that of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, but all passionate about technologies and their evolutions in society.

I have tried my best to blog as "live" as possible about the sessions that particularly interested me. As blogs are a new tool to me and live blogging a completely unknown form of reporting, I have learnt a lot by practicing. I enjoyed this a lot (except the problem with Internet connections) and will continue improving my burgeoning skills in this field.

On a more personal note, LIFT accomplished a small miracle for me. I'm a very shy person and in a big gathering like this, I would normally end up sitting in my own corner, not talking to anyone. But the atmosphere was so relax and comfortable that people were opened to all the participants. No exclusive group formed that would isolate themselves from the others, as I have seen happening in other big conferences, making it difficult for those coming as outsider individuals to integrate. This way I have been able to encounter people with whom I hope to keep in touch in the future in order to collaborate on projects of common interest or to keep as friends, with whom I had a good time at LIFT.

Will the fictional character of Motoko Kusanagi, created by Masamune Shirow in his 1990's manga, come to be real thanks to scientists like Kevin Warwick? For those who don't know the manga (and derivated series and movies) Ghost in the Shell, the story belongs the cyberpunk genre and features a world where, according to the introduction itself, the digital networks have spum around the planet and connect people together. Motoko Kusanagi is a full cyborg, leading the "section 9", a special and highly secret police force dealing with international cybercriminality and depending directly from the government. She can connect herself directly to the Internet and can contact her pals without having to use email, phones or any other traditional communicating device, simply contacting their brain through their prosthetic boosting device. She of course has a body that displays superhuman physical powers (strength, agility, and resistance). What animates her is her "ghost", a term defining what serves as a sort of digital soul to cyborgs of this fictional universe, in which you can actually "dive" using computer interfaces. However, this poses her many problem, not least that of her identity, the reality of her existence. And her super-boosted body simply doesn't belong to her, but to the government, meaning that if she wants to resign from her job, she won't be left with much but a few organic neurone, the only remnants of her past "humanity".

Unfortunately, I missed Marc Lamperrouza's presentaton on the development of new technologies in China, but it's not every day that you get to see one of your former university professors that have made an impact on your present situation, so I bet I couldn't miss that!

One sure thing is that Asia is hyper-connected, especially Japan and Korea, followed by Taiwan, China and India, where digital and mobile technology development seems to be very dynamic. It is particularly interesting to hear from Ms. Heewon Kim how the technological cultures in Japan and Korea have evolved, promoting community communication over simple straight communication between A & B, and the practices of "self-branding" and "real-time intimacy" monitoring it has given rise to. At the same time, isn't it a bit worrying that people are letting others to know what they are doing at every moment of their life, including telling them whether they are available for socialization or not? I know that we are many to jump on the Facebook or MySpace bandwagon, but most of us newbies keep the level of status revelation quite low. Personally, I don't even take it seriously and often put nonsense in it or stuff that no one else but me can understand (like: Ariane is going da da da, which refers to something very specific, but you'd have to be a fan of GITS-Second GIG to know what this is).

Having a little internet access problem?
http://www.liftconference.com/noaccesswifi-07feb08-0
NoAccessWiFi_07Feb08

What can ethnographical research reveal about the people's use of technologies that classical marketing studies miss? This is the question for which Yonghee Jung and Genevieve Bell, both anthropologists working in design teams for two high tech companies, have offered some answers. Paul Dourish, as the academic anthropologist has somewhat played the devil's advocate by pointing out that such "design ethnographies" also have weak points, that should be taken into account.

Yonghee Jung showed how people can get emotionally and even symbolically involved with the mobile technologies of their daily lives. She took as example one of the projects of her design team, called Nokia Open Studio (NOS), as an example of this phenomenon. The NOS aimed at putting people back at the heart of technology design by sending anthropologists to actually ask them what kind of mobile phone would be most useful to them. Three teams were sent for 2 weeks in three different communities: one in Mumbai, India, another in Rio, Brazil and a third in Accra, capital of Ghana. Since the time they had at hand was short, they mixed several methods (ethnography, street surveys and group meetings) to maximize their capacity to get as much insights from these people as possible. They offered these people to design the mobile phone of their dream and offered an award to the best one. It allowed the NOS team to analyze how these people understand what mobile phone are meant for, how they should be used and what specific needs related to their daily routine they should fullfill.

After listening to Alexander Finger's presentation, entitled "Civil Rights 2.0 and what European Governments do to fight them" this morning, I had the feeling that the only way to preserve my privacy would be to withdraw completely from civilization and lock myself in a cave. His perspective on the way technologies can be used to collect information on us and our daily routines should be enough to raise the hair on the head of any citizen. Instead, not only does there seem to be no public debates on many practices of data collection and retention by authorities, but a large number of people seems to feel that it a lesser evil to preserve the physical safety of honorable citizen. I was already aware of the "big brother" issue, but I must say that the examples offered by Alexander Finger make it appear in a much more concrete light.

- A few years ago, an east-german journalist decided to run an inquiry on a child pornography website that was hosted on a server located in Philipines. He thus paid with his credit card to have a full access to the website and then went to the prosecutor to ask him to launch an investigation about the owners and "customers" of this website. The problem is that he was confronted with a crime, but no physical and identifiable suspects. The judge then asked the credit institutions to turn in informations about all the German cards holders who had performed online transactions of a certain amount during a specific time span. In the process, not only did the judge asked the banks to produce suspects, when one usually looks for suspects, but made hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, potential criminals.