I come across a lot of people during my working week. I then chat or talk to a lot of people online out of work. Most of them have one thing in common.
What’s that then?
Mobile phones. I do not know anyone who does not own a mobile phone. If I talk to people about their choice of mobile normally the response will be along these lines “I got it because it’s cheap”, “I got it because my friend had one” or “I like pink phones” all of which are perfectly normal answers from normal people.
Increasingly though I have come across fanatics who come out with responses like “I got it because it’s the best phone ever, what have you got, bet mines better than yours”, “I didn’t get one of those because they support slavery”, “I got one of those because I was brainwashed by years of marketing” or “I just have to have an Android phone because all of the other makes are rubbish”.
Ask that question online and boy do you start off a big argument. There seems to be three camps of people Android users, iOS users and Windows Phone users. Each camp willing to take the slightest comment to heart and retaliate aggressively.
At this point you are into Fanbois territory. Fanbois have been around for a while, originally arguing about which comic books were better. Nowadays though each brand of technology seems to have a band of zealots ready to fight their cause.
Take the recent announcements from Samsung and HTC. HTC released the One X and shortly after that Samsung released the Galaxy SIII. My social networks were full of people arguing about which phone was better. Then every time a manufacturer announces something new the arguments start up again, saying that device B is way worse than device A. Most things tend to turn nasty with one party threatening to block them and then thats it. Game over.
As much as I am looking forward to September because it is my anniversary and I get to go on holiday, I also am not looking forward to September. For three reasons the “new iPhone”, the new Lumia range and whatever Motorola announce on the same day as Nokia. Each event should hopefully bring something new to the table. Each event will also have people watching who are just ready to post a comment somewhere along the lines of “I am not going to buy this phone because it looks rubbish”, “Nokia should have gone with Android” “I love Apple” or “Windows Phone is rubbish”. Another event that will probably break the internet will be the final judgement on the Apple vs Samsung (Samsung vs Apple) court case. Unless Judge Koh announces it a draw and sends them both packing, millions of angry fanbois are going to be screaming injustice from the rooftops. I am thinking of disconnecting myself from the internet to avoid having to hear the post case backlash.
People seem to enjoy deliberately posting stupid comments designed to provoke others. It really doesn’t make sense. The pinnacle of comment stupidity is YouTube, almost every single video, be it a music video, an unboxing video or just me mumbling about my Nexus 7, has illiterate people mouthing off because they think they are right about the chosen subject.
It is never going to change. A lot of the big national papers every day have most articles descend into a battle of words over the most trivial case matter. My local newspaper website every day has to stop comments after a few hours of each article being published.
I wish that one day you could watch a conversation on Twitter like this:
“@usersA What phone do you have then?”
“@usersB A Samsung Galaxy SIII”
“@userA Oh cool I have heard good things about them, I have an iPhone and I think that it equals your phone. lol”
“@userB I think they are equal too. lol”
With technology I try to be as open minded as possible. My recent thoughts about experimenting with iOS came to nothing, I ended buying several new Android devices instead. My long term Windows Phone experiment was scuppered by the Windows Phone 8 upgrade announcement. Maybe this new bread of devices coming out soon will get me to jump ship. the longer I stay with a particular brand the more I believe all of the propaganda on the internet about that brands competitors. Things like “Samsung are innocent leave them alone” or equally as common “Apple are evil”.
We as tech bloggers do not help matters either. We started off covering just Windows Mobile, then deciding to cover iOS and Android. The website then took a heavy lean towards Android. This was never a conscious decision by anyone. It was just the fact that all of the writers had Android devices. Cue several years of posting Android related stuff. Nowadays we do have a broader range of writers and will hopefully continue in this balanced manner. Yes some weeks we may only post things relating to Android, but wait until September I am sure the iOS writers will have something to say on the subject.
So if you hate the Trolls and Fanbois ranting about things then I suggest you take cover, September is going to be horrendous.
James, it will never end.
My first phone was a Nokia 2140, back in the days when the ‘new’ Orange network had three handsets to choose from. Time passed, a few more models, then I got my first ‘smartphone’ an SPV C500 made by the then unknown HTC.
Finally the M700, back then Windows on a phone was not a thing of beauty, stylus driven on a resistive touch screen. But I loved it. People thought I was strange, why would I want to browse the internet on a phone!
Fast forward to today. Every man and his dog has a mobile, and they all have an opinion. It seems the more ill informed they are, the louder their voice.
The genie is out of the bottle, I’m afraid……