It seems to me that people are grouping themselves into new media and technological user groups. I’m worried if this is dangerous. Let me explain.
Here’s an example. You look at some pasty faced female human with no make-up on and fairly immediately you can map out her entire character and style. Yep, she’s vegetarian, is / was an extensive drug user, hates carpet, buys people shares in abused goats for their birthdays, talks to trees, and buys her clothes from Oxfam shops.
See what I mean? One clue and you can pretty confidently map out everything else about a person’s life-style. It works every time.
Well, this seems to be happening with technology.
At first the divide was simple: PC users, Mac users. But now it’s continuing onwards. PC users will congregate together and use specific social networking sites, whilst Mac users will use others. Interestingly, the choices they make seem to reflect the technology they love. This has become the case with mobile phone integrated sites like Jaiku and Twitter, or even mobile phones like the iPhone and the Nokia N95.
Take Mac users. Your typical Mac user likes to think he is aloof and special. He’s quite a cynical chap. He’s driven by his feminine side; it’s important to him that his technology is pretty. Anything with an ‘i’ in front of it seems to be Mac-ish, and designed to appeal to these transvestites, erm, I meant, ‘new’ men. What’s important to the Mac user is not whether it works or anything, but how pretty it looks. Hence you’ll see Mac users infesting Twitter or using iPhones. Now, Twitter has very limited functionality and is really just a way of making profound announcements and not allowing threads of conversation. iPhones are pretty and touch screen and so on, but actually inside have very limited technology compared to (for example) the N95. So, proof positive that shiny bangles impress the Mac user, real working and useful technology doesn’t.
Now, PC users. Your typical PC user likes to get under the hood of his car. He can’t be doing with all that pretty stuff; he’s a man’s man. He farts and scratches his balls with axle grease still on his fingers. He wants his technology all cheap and nasty, but working powerfully and doing the job he wants it to do. If it doesn’t he’ll smash it into a thousand pieces, no problem. So, you’ll find PC users infesting Jaiku or using N95s. Jaiku has brilliant threading and logical friendly methods of replying and actually having real conversations (so, obviously no place for the aloof Mac users), although it doesn’t look as pretty as Twitter. The N95 has far more gadgetry, bells and whistles than the iPhone but it doesn’t look as pretty. So, it’s a useful tool that works, a workhorse even, but not a shiny bangle.
I suspect we will continue to have this divide between humans, typified by its Mac -v- PC beginnings. And, like the pasty-faced woman who we could tell so much about just by looking at her, we’ll soon be able to tell exactly who we are dealing with at meetings depending on whether he whips out his iPhone or his N95. The question for the future is who will we want to work with, people from our own personal Mac or PC allegiance or will we look for redeeming qualities beyond the Mac / PC divide?
Can we eventually live in harmony or will we see the equivalent of the crusades and jihad or, at the very least, non-integrated parallel living, suspicion and mistrust that the old religions provide humanity with?
England's England 