An odd thing happened last week: A large technology company (nearly universally known and widely respected and loved) released a
new social networking aggregator, free, to users of its (also free, and widely used) email service.
That they did this is not the odd part.
The odd part, the thing that made me take pause, was how familiar this reaction has become.
Think about it: in the past 2 years, how many times have we seen this? How many new product launches have been met with this type of derision, this collective “meh”? Google Buzz, the
iPad,
President Obama. All have felt the swift sea change from media darlings to pariahs. The Facebook Redesign Backlash has become as reliable as Death and Taxes. But why?
I asked some folks on Twitter their opinions, to varied response. One user, @majormoore, chimed in with the succinct “uhh because the products don’t live up to the hype.” And maybe that is true. But whose fault is that? Who created that hype to begin with?
The answer is us. We did. Increasingly, we build hype and then complain when the product fails to live up to our own inflated expectations.
The Internet and society at large has undergone this subtle shift, this increasing fragmentation. When we started this whole thing, message boards were filled with passionate, niche fanboys, and each small community had its own critics, and its own defenders. The rise of blogs gave a more public voice to the user, letting them curate a voice and identity that could have shades of grey.
But with the advent of microblogging on Twitter and Facebook alike, the pieces of the collective attention pie are growing exponentially thin. The combination of a steadily growing online user base along with a far more public and homogenized forum means that we react not with many voices, but a chorus. And increasingly it’s a chorus of boos.
Why? Because as someone once noted, everyone’s a critic, especially on the Internet. Our culture has steadily moved towards one of critical thought; a culture where every experience, whether it be culinary, cinematic, or emotional, needs to be analyzed, ranked and rated. 5 stars. Two thumbs up. Hot or not. And the easiest way to be a critic is to be negative, to come up with some complaint about why you dislike something, to point out a flaw, is the easiest most base form of critical thinking. Folks think that by coming out and saying “the iPad is just a big iPhone with a shitty name!” they are somehow defining their personal online brand as a Technological Analyst. They are trying, in vain, to rise above the crowd by shouting the same message.
This is troubling because, increasingly, our opinions and reactions are directly tied to the financial success of the companies we both love and deride. Say what you want about Apple’s secrecy– imagine the technological landscape without them. Imagine the mobile OS landscape without the iPhone. But with every new product launch, those achievements are quickly forgotten. We set the bar higher, and then are shocked when they fail.
Hopefully this is an adolescent trend in the puberty of the Internet. Hopefully we’re in that obnoxious “I know everything and I will tell you whether you like it or not” phase. Hopefully we’ll grow up, get laid, and start listening to better music (metaphorically speaking). Because right now, all this negativity is making the Internet a drag.
(Twitter user @deanjanssen pointed me to this great post, which says what I just did, but far more entertainingly:
here)