Getting together at 2gether08

At 2gether08 today and I quickly realised that this “unconference” is a bit of a Twitter fest. If you looked at Twitter this morning from 8am-9am, you would've thought that the whole of Twitter was going to 2gther08.

On arrival, my theory was confirmed

After meeting Russell Davies (@russelldavies), Dominic Campbell (@dominiccampbell) and Michael Waugaman (@waugaman) at the entrance, I made my way into the main theatre for the opening session. I sat next to Geoff Laycock (@geofflaycock) and behind Jemima Kiss (@jemimakiss), with Bill Thompson (@billt) up on stage. See what I mean with the Twitter invasion?

After an introduction by Steve from Channel 4 (not sure if he's on Twitter), the opening session got under way.

Umair Haque of Havas Laboratories kicked off with a talk on Constructive Capitalism. He offered us a challenge - to drop our cynicism and start realising that our agenda is rethinking capitalism. We are on the cusp of an economic enlightenment and a corporate renaissance: Our challenge is to drive them forward.

It pained him to say, but companies like Starbucks, Wallmart and Microsoft are changing the way businesses look at the world – they are the the ones who are most powerfully pushing Constructive Capitalism. Haque left his intro without an ending as he is presenting the idea later on in the day. I'm sue many people will be there to see how it ends.

John Naish, Medical Editor at The Guardian and author of the book “Enough”, was next up. The brain has never been faced with the problem of abundance – it has always craved for more. This applies to food, drink, etc, but he wants to talk about information. We are all now avid information consumers and most of our decisions are affected by the information we consume.

This was fine before the information of the internet. Rather than happening within your local range (e.g. 1-2 miles), things that happen on the internet are on a global scale and make us think that this information is important to our lives. Celebrities are the best example – if David Beckham wears a certain brand of underwear, it makes us think that not only do we want to be a famous footballer but to be one we have to also wear that particular brand of underwear.

Never before has humanity had to deal with this problem. It is great to have all of this information, but there is a new challenge with how to deal with it to make it efficient and helpful. The debate therefore revolves around the question of “What's enough for me?” Not only as consumers do we have to decide what is enough, but as producers we have to take responsibility and decide what is enough. It is a term he calls “Info-besity”.

Matthews Taylor from RSA took the stage and entertained us with a short poem:

In Shoreditch town where I was born,

We all eat organic humous and pitta.

We all work as consultants,

And we live our lives on Twitter.

He spoke of a “Social Aspiration Gap “, where people talk about a future they want to be involved in, but don't act in a way to make this happen. This is ether through apathy or through a mass of contradictions, e.g. you want to save the environment but also want to fly to Spain on holiday. We are completely out of touch with the notion of our inner selves – we create an inner voice that doesn't exist (who is the conversation with when you say “I said to myself”?), we don't control the boundary between our inner and outer selves, and we are too optimistic about the future and pessimistic about how we would cope with a catastrophe.

He is interested in what happens when the Social Inspiration Gap and our Western notion about the self, the mythologicalisation of the individual, comes together. When you ask him what the biggest challenge in the world is, the answer is you.