[LINK] What's in a name? Everything! [was: Smartcard mooted for federal welfare payments]
Stephen Wilson
swilson at lockstep.com.au
Tue Apr 21 14:39:56 AEST 2009
Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
> Customer, Client, Consumer, Citizen...what's the difference - perhaps we could
> just use relevant or irrelevant voter
The difference between Citizen and Customer is surely obvious, and
non-trivial. Customers pay for service. Service providers treat paying
customers differently. The trend to label everyone as a "customer"
could be an insidious societal propaganda program that drags us all
unwittingly into a user-pays mind set.
For instance, what's the underlying agenda when a patient in the public
health system is called a "customer"?
And why do they always call public transport passengers "customers"?
The language makes it axiomatic that the user pays, marginalising any
argument that perhaps we should travel on government transport for free,
for the broader good of the community.
And so on and so forth.
But the most ludicrous example I've seen of misusing "customer" -- an
instance that is so illiterate that nobody could ascribe a conspiracy
theory to it -- came from law enforcement a few years ago. A brochure
from the manufacturer of fingerprinting equipment designed for the
police said something along the lines of 'The ACME 9000 allows you to
digitise the fingerprints of your customers more quickly ...'.
Huh? Since when are criminal suspects the "customers" of the police? I
thought if anyone was their "customer", it would have been me, the citizen!
Cheers,
Stephen Wilson
Lockstep
www.lockstep.com.au
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