I have not got much patience with often-repeated phrases, even ones that made sense the first time I heard them. You often hear these days about how “passive consumers” have been replaced (as if by magic) with “active producers”.
Now, quite apart from the tautological ugliness of the assignations (wouldn’t producer and consumer be sufficient?) I find the implicit approval for the active, and the disdain for the passive, troubling.
This is partly because I feel that often the words “active” and “passive” have been redefined. Using the consumer/producer model, it is considered passive to listen, or to watch, when in fact listening is an active verb, while hearing is its passive equivalent, watching is active, while seeing is passive.
Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about, but it’s everywhere, so these are just some samples that came quickly to hand:
- children explain the difference between being a lazy consumer and a busy-bee producer
- a pretty standard blog post on the subject
- here it is given as a reason why you should learn algebra
I’m pretty sure the second example there, the blogger who saw Clay Shirky speak, has a more nuanced understanding of this issue than “producers = active = good, consumers = passive = bad”. I know that is not an argument that Clay is likely to be making.
But that simplistic argument does seem to have some currency, particularly when children are the target audience. Do we really want to be teaching our children that passive activities like listening and watching are a waste of their time? The old adage was that you should listen twice as much as you speak, the idea being that wisdom came from paying attention, not from looking for attention.
These days attention is bankable and, more importantly, measurable. It is easy to see from someone’s online presence how much attention they get, far harder to know how much attention they pay to what is going on around them.
My own particular area of interest is online video, and I read all the time about how new tools make it easy for people to film themselves and put their videos online. But surely the opportunity to watch videos made by other people is just as important as the ability to make some yourself? In fact, unless you think so, and act so, the producer/consumer dichotomy isn’t broken at all, it’s just fragmented into two billion tiny pieces.
If the response to the Internet and its ability to connect us to one another in new ways is to think “brilliant, now I can make my very own TV show and put it on YouTube”, then that’s pretty depressing and very limiting. If we’re all a little bit less consumer and a little bit more producer, then in fact we’re all something else entirely. It’s not what you produce (or consume) that matters so much as how you connect with other people and what use you put those connections to.
