Much ink has been spilled, and many a pixel lit, on objects to which people feel an unreasonable loyalty. Blood, too, depending on whether you’re willing to classify the likes of Crusaders and soccer hooligans as fanboys. And why not? These rivalries, from the biblical to the forum-bound, all have a certain distinctive unreason to them. Yet there is nothing more reasonable than sticking by your choices, your judgments, your perceptions — your brands. So how do things get so venomous? It seems like pitchforks are issued with every browser these days. Let’s see if we can make sense of why so many of us end up escalating to such absurd heights something so clearly trivial. Confession To begin with, let’s have a little therapy session. I want you to repeat after me: “I am a fanboy.” Or fangirl. Go ahead, say it. You don’t have to actually say it. But recognize that you are one — not necessarily for something obvious, or in an obvious way, but you are. Okay, I’ll start. I’m a not-using-Twitter fanboy. I’ve written about it before, and even though my friends and colleagues make excellent arguments for it, I refuse to. Why? Because it’s one of the things on which I can take a stand and (this is crucial) see the effect of that stand. That’s really all there is to it, isn’t it? We all want to take a stand, we all want a conflict, we all want to be fighting for the right side of something. And the fact is that for some of us, our brand choices are among the most important things in our lives. Yes, brand shapes us more than we’d like to admit (it’s arguable even that our religions and political parties are increasingly brandlike. That was actually part of the discussion that led to this article: buying a webOS tablet over iOS or Android would be like voting for Nader. Well, there was more to it than that, but you get the idea). There’s a sort of existential nausea that accompanies this banality, so we create entire mythologies peripheral to those choices in order to increase the scope of the conflict. How else could Mac versus PC, or iPhone versus Android, devolve into meta-discussions of rights to privacy, corporate mottos, the personality traits of executives? Like pedantic philosophers, …
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Fanboyism: When Expression Meets Desperation
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