Musings & Meanderings

There’ve been many rounds of conversation in recent years about the term users. Many dislike it intensely. I’ve always had a ‘…just don’t call me late for dinner’ attitude to this term, finding it perfectly appropriate in some circumstances and less so in others. Instead of looking for an alternative generic term that encompasses every single person using a computer for any reason, I usually try to make the terminology congruent with the activity. Sort of an ‘it is what it does’ approach.

Here are some examples of terms I use:

1. audience
2. citizen
3. constituent
4. contributor
5. customer
6. member
7. participant
8. service provider
9. user
10. vendor
11. viewer
12. visitor

Last week’s conversation about Glam, on Michael Arrington’s and Jeff Jarvis’s blogs (here and here), got me thinking about this again, and realizing just how overly broad the definitions of our different roles here is. In many ways, those of us who’ve been around for some time still tend to think of geeks vs non-techs in terms of both support and business, of active users vs lurkers (and worse) in terms of forums and communities, and so on. These two-sided definitions make sense when observing and comprehending online activity from the perspective of personal experience. The more you broaden that perspective, however, the more variant roles and activities become, begging further definition. Beyond a core group, whether it’s social or special interest or a dev team, are far more complex communities and, further, entire societies.

Glam, for example, illustrates how increasingly professional bloggers and web publishers have become sub-contractors for advertisers. This may be a fairly traditional media model, but the old publishing definitions of writer and reader don’t fit the same way here. Whether we’re offering opinion, analysis, or entertainment online, the moment we start selling advertising we become a vendor of space in a way closer to a landlord model than to any other. The advertiser isn’t paying us for our attention, but for the numbers of other ‘eyeballs’ we can attract. So Glam and similar sites are, in effect, supporting a range of commercial activity that spans the entire marketing and media gamut from product to customer. Glam has users and its users have users, and so on.

The media model is one of the more complex ones, especially where it overlaps with pure free speech, but there are many other ecosystems developing in which one of the activities only is the exchange of goods and/or services. The difficulty with new role definitions here is that we each can play far more of them, and in more ways, than ever before. User, whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the term, doesn’t come close to recognizing the range of multiple roles of a billion people beginning to create new ecocosms. There are hundreds of categories and thousands of definitions of hardware and software. There are endless business and job categories. Shouldn’t we have at least as many for the users? There are more of us, doing more various things, than in either of the first 2 groups, which some of us are also part of.

Me Tarzan …you Jane. See Spot run …to get online and click here? Machines are awesome, something I’ve believed in since I discovering Lotus 123 and DBase II about 25 years ago. Free societies, with free speech and free enterprise, are pretty awesome too. Advancing our comprehension of, and communication about, the latter up to the level of the former, is a goal worth pursuing, imo. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 12:08 am and is filed under Web Development, Perspective, Internet Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.