Doc Searls’ talk at reboot focused on the language we use to frame the network. When we use the network, are we users? the audience? participants? subscribers?
I thought of Doc’s talk this morning when I read this FAQ on changes to the Canadian Copyright Act. Question number seven is:
Is there a risk that protection of technological measures (TMs) will adversely affect users?
The answer to this FAQ doesn’t bear repeating, as it is essentially content-free.
The important thing to note, for me, is that we the people are referenced as “users” in this question. I thought the government was ours, looking out for our interests and that, at the very least, we should be addresses as citizens, not “users.”
Comments
I still bristle whenever I hear the word ‘consumer’ when ‘person’ would work just as well.
I don’t know if this is on topic. Probably not. But it *is* on the topic of citizenship/technology more generally and on the topic of Producer Orientedness [a reference to Trent Radio —- could we get a Rukipedia entry here?]: Anyway, has anyone noticed that a new TV network is starting up? Its mission is to combine regular journalism with citizen journalism and it is being billed as independent because it has no advertising and no government funding (the money will be raised through individual donations). It’s called Independent World Television. I think it’s interesting.
The web site is here: http://www.iwtnews.com/#
There is an article about it here:http://www.techreview.com/arti…
Okay, I created a wiki page for Trent Radio. Now you can go and edit it.
While “user” is graceless, the copyright rules apply to resident non-citizens as well as non-resident non-citizens using material covered by Canadian copyrightlaw.