I should make clear at this point that what we need is not to get people to stop using one word and start using another, but to understand more clearly what the differences are, why we have them, and how they keep us from thinking more deeply about what both words mean and how they work.

And also, as Alan says, how both have commercial meanings — and that we are not always operating in a commercial context. Nor do we wish only to be commercial beings. Our lives are larger than that.

First, there weren’t so many companies and everyone wanted to keep people coming back (the customers – a term that, in my opinion gives more respect to the buyer) so they spoiled a lot of them, now companies work on bulk and they are starting to disregard their clients although they are the ones that keep them alive and so the customer became known as the consumer

A better analogy for this would be the poker meme.

”If you look around the table and can’t spot the sucker, than you are the sucker.”

In the case of the so called “Social Networks”, your definition of customer is a little short. Hunters would be a bit closer to the mark.

Consumers are targets with internet connections.

I would like to make the argument that there is a parity in the relationship between the users of the web and these networks, but it falls down as soon as the tracking of our activities becomes known. It is not necessary to use these sites in a lot of cases, as links and beacons are proliferated on other sites and tracking continues.

The argument that this is not malware, but merely marketing data, is bullshit in my view. History tracking is no different than keystroke logging, or user name password theft. The idea that they should be happy just visiting their sites instead of thieving from us like an electronic TSA strip search, genital grab shows how far the web has been corrupted by marketeers.

The standard disclaimer by websites that they are pure as the driven snow, and it is those third party sites who pay them money are to blame is also bullshit, because this is not passive information, but aggressive theft and privacy violation. Because at the end of the day, this information’s value is not to enrich your experience on the web, but is all about spending the least amount of money to sell you shit you can probably do without.

The worst part of this is that folks are doing it to themselves.

What matters is less what we call things than that distinctions are made.

I worked in commercial broadcasting, directly or indirectly, for many years, during which I watched station after station, network after network, suffer the same problem that now afflicts Google, Facebook and every other enterprise on the Web for which those who use the service, and those who pay for it, are different populations. The former tend, over and over again, to get subordinated, disrespected, out outright screwed (it differs from one case to the next) — for the simple reason that the company is not financially accountable to them.

Maybe “users vs. customers” is a better distinction than “consumers vs. customers.” I lean toward the latter. But I also have to acknowledge that “consumer” is a far less degraded term in Europe than it is in the U.S.