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.
(via Memex 1.1)
