Consommacteurs v technocrats

I learned a new word this week consommacteurs. It’s the French for consumers who are also actors, or even activists, the millions from the YouTube generation(s) who don’t just consume but also create, who don’t merely partake but take part, and who don’t so much buy brands as use them.

Then yesterday I experienced the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, the biggest annual mobile-phone trade fair. This was a sea of unsmiling men, the technocrats who are quietly changing the world. As one of them said, in a couple of years as many people will have a mobile as have a toothbrush. It’s an incredible new power in people’s hands, opening up commerce on an unprecedented scale: another speaker claimed that whenever an emerging economy installs a mobile network, GDP goes up 5%.

In their own way, these billions of phone users are consommacteurs too, using mobiles as a way to take part in the world to get work, do their banking, share photos, even (as in Burma) expose injustice. And at some point soon, these consommacteurs will become even more powerful shapers of the world than the Barcelona technocrats who made it all possible.

15 February 2008, posted by Robert Jones