Some members of the Macworld community were in a state of moderate dudgeon this week over unflattering comments about the iMac in one of their forums.
I’m floored by this, largely because I thought that technical folk of any age enjoyed intellectual exchange with other bright people who don’t necessarily agree with them.
Gueesss not.
This is not to pick on Macworld by any means, no online forum is safe from antagonistic, you’re either “with us” or “ag’in’ us”, puffery. Disagreement based on logical considerations is considered a threat, not part of a dialogue.
This observation helps me to understand some of the otherwise incomprehensible experiences I’ve had over the last several years in IT departments.
During the 70’s and 80’s, there was a trend in education called the self-esteem movement. There were no such thing as winners, everyone got a medal, everyone was told they were wonderful.
As a result, I’ve noticed that many people in their thirties get bent out of shape when anyone disagrees with them. They take it as a personal insult. In fact, they’ve invented a word for this, “trolling”. In other words, if you posit a pro-or-con argument in an online forum, you’re a “troll”, or someone who is simply argumentative just to be unpleasant to everyone else.
This is completely different from the way I was raised. I was in junior high/high school during the Sputnik era, which threw the US educational system into a frenzy. Overnight, public schools became intensely competitive. The 60’s were a time of tremendous turmoil and, indeed, arguments.
I’ll never forget a cartoon by Jules Feiffer, in which one of the characters has a meltdown, the result of envying the clever repartee of a second character at a cocktail party.
The first character, in frustration, explodes with a string of potty words and expletives. As the other guests look on, horrified, the object of envy turns down the heat with the classic riposte, “Let us define your terms.”
That’s somewhat exemplary of the social dialogue I remember from those times, disagreement being part of the lingua franca.
And consider the following, from Jean Twenge, the lead author of a 24-year (1982 to 2006) study called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory:
“Twenge, the author of ‘Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before,’ said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism, and favor self-promotion over helping others.
“The researchers traced the phenomenon back to what they called the ‘self-esteem movement’ that emerged in the 1980s, asserting that the effort to build self-confidence had gone too far.
“As an example, Twenge cited a song commonly sung to the tune of ‘Fr