I love new memes. This one happens to be close to my heart, because we’re all in the middle of it.

Lucas Gonze is propagating a new term: lightnet. The concept is something I, and the other that are now part of The Podcast Network, have been riffing about for years, but this gives it an umbrella term. It’s also a great word that is sure to be picked up by old media, because it’s cool and non-techie.

I think Eli Chapman sums it up nicely.

Lightnet feeds itself through nurturing and enabling the expression of the creative impulses we experience during content consumption. Darknet restrains and/or swallows up these impulses for personal gain. With Lightnet, our aggregate participatory media experiences are like earth worms toiling the soil we live in- the attention we spend consuming media fuels the creation of new more relavant media, entertainment, and information.

This term, if used well, and propagated quickly and clearly, could be the gate to freedom. With Doc Searls suggesting that major telecommunications companies are on the verge of killing the Internet, we need a term to describe the freedom that the Internet is providing, one that individuals can understand easily. Lightnet could be just the word we need.

Doc suggests that the terms we currently use to describe the Internet, get bogged down in traditional telco wordage. This is exactly what they want, because they need to convince the public that they own it. Well they’ll never own lightnet, and they’ll struggle to co-opt and legislate our online experiences and communities if we adopt fresh words like it.

There is a del.icio.us feed for Lightnet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at 4:51 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.