He's also argued that people would volunteer money for artists if all music was distributed through peer-to-peer technologies. I'm not sure I buy that either! I think it's utopian thinking to believe that people would pay for things that they don't have to - that they're not expected to... It's possible, of course - tipping is a good parallel here - but tipping has a social pressure attached to it, a physical and personal interaction at the heart of the financial exchance. You can easily be shamed. You'd need stuff like that built in to the system to make that happen...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 23, 2003 5:06 PM

A really nice quote from Rheingold's piece:
"Social Capital that's just leaking into the air now could be captured and put to work for us."

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 23, 2003 5:10 PM

Rheingold has been talking about the need for reputation modelling in distributed networks - is this ideology of 'trust' really useful? Isn't it just the codification of standard social interactions - the enhancement - the prosthesis of social advantages... Is Reputation too narrow a word for getting a 'sense' of a person for 'knowing' them...?

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 23, 2003 5:14 PM

He's also talked about a lot of interesting stuff about handheld equipment being attached to barcode readers which in turn connect to the internet - providing information about products and their background whensoever you want to find it out. Lots of interesting things that could emerge around that. If it was just food products in the supermarket then there's stuff about getting background on the companies that make them, but also stuff about good recipes, detailed information, databases that amend and record your intake of various substances (Atkins diet tracker?). Good blocks of material there alone. There could be possible side effects - could you find a piece of music online by getting the barcode and searching for it online? wander into a shop, scan your CD barcode and coded music online is found as if by magic and downloaded through a proper P2P thing.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 23, 2003 5:24 PM

(I hope this post isn't just for your comments but,)

He is wrong, the difference between a 'user' and 'consumer' is just one he makes up, it's a malleable distinction people can use as they wish, and he's found his own use, which seems to be wrong.

There may be some slight distinction, but what he's trying to draw isn't really some ideological gulf between being passive and active but instead just illuminating that people who want to be passive and watch TV and listen to music are so bored by what's being offered (monotonous, repetitive, homogenized crap--not to mention redundant adjectives), so they are creating their own content [often to the same morose, unentertaining effect).

OK, maybe he didn't say that, but if you turn on TV you'd agree.

→ Posted by: Ry Rivard at April 23, 2003 5:45 PM

Is Rheingold just willfully ignoring the term 'customer,' which in my experience with large Fortune 500 firms is how they usually refer to their, um, customers? It's inherently more respectful than 'consumer,' and in my experience marketers at these companies due tend to have a good deal of respect for the customers who keep the lights on...

It sounds to me like he's practicing semantics toward his own ends.

→ Posted by: michael sippey at April 23, 2003 8:28 PM

But he seems so obviously correct. There is absolute integrity in the distinction between passive consumption and active use, except insofar as "use" of a product signifies its consumption anyway.

I definitely think many companies have an interest in maintaining the conventional "consumer" dynamic -even if only a semantic definition, a production line model makes it easier to sell to a mass audience.

Granted, there are companies whose aim is to sell to "users". Let's make a third category, "creators"... recent emerging technologies like digital cameras, DV cameras are sold as being enablers of creative impulses... "Go create". Here, the distinction between consumer and user blurs - but only so far as the consumer electronics market by now knows very well how to market its wares for users but, all the while, shift and package them via those conventional consumer avenues in place so well already.

So, do companies have a self-interest in returning "users" to "consumerdom"? Yes and, increasingly, no... no because they are now adept at defining the latter in the sales pitch of the former.

That means those companies retain a primacy of authority which only the completion of the new mass (produced) media revolution can truly usurp.

Or something.

→ Posted by: Rob at April 23, 2003 11:44 PM

Too optimistic by half - both Coates and Rheingold on different sides of the same coin. Corporations are, by their nature about making money. That is the system and the mindset they work within. Because this system forms the structure (most) people live within, people will continue to be consumers. The fact that a few people on the edges of the broader society think or hope that things will change, changes nothing.

Users, consumers... doesn't matter. The market will (and is beginning to) poison free exchanges. We have not seen them in full effect yet, but we will. The corporations have hardly begun, and are hiring the brighter young things they need to fulfill this goal now.

Be secure in the knowledge that the little tastes of user orientated freedom we have had over the past few years will not be the last, however there will not be an opening of the floodgates either.

Do as you are told, or you will be told what to do.

→ Posted by: pod at April 24, 2003 12:22 AM

Steve Jobs once said:
"You go to your TV to turn your brain off. You go to the computer when you want to turn your brain on."

→ Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at April 24, 2003 8:29 PM