Sunday, October 29, 2006
No blogging allowed at "consumer generated media" conference
The Nielsen Buzzmetrics conference on "Consumer Generated Media" (e.g., blogs, Flickr streams, youtubes, Wikipedia, etc) has a blanket prohibition on any reporting or blogging. Now, there's nothing wrong with an off-the-record conference, I've attended and even helped run many of them. But the usual practice is to adopt the Chatham House Rule -- no reporting on stuff that the speaker declares off-the-record, and no attributing any remarks without permission of the speaker. It's pretty ironic for a "consumer generated media" conference to prohibit the creation of "consumer generated media."
Of course, the use of the word "consumer" there is telling. The more commonly accepted neologism is "user-created content" -- "user" has more dignity that "consumer," which always reminds me of Gibson's description of "something the size of a baby hippo living in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka, covered with eyes...[with] no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."
Maybe the organizers style themselves and their attendees as a cut above "consumer," and therefore not susceptible to creating "consumer generated media." But there's an interesting parallel to the standards meetings and UN treaty bodies I've attended on Internet gonvernance -- the less Internet access those meetings had, the more likely it was that the meeting had been called to destroy the Internet. Link (via Memex 1.1)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:16:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
