Platypus

We live in an age in which more personal emphasis is placed on the performance of others than ever before. In the performance of others, I do not mean supporting the soldiers of one’s counry, or buying and holding stock; these are cases in which excellent performance on the other party tends to have a clearly recognizable connection to a benefit you may subsequently receive. Rather, I refer to cases in which there is no substantial connection- financial, personal, or otherwise- between the devoted and devotee.

For decades this sort of relationship has been most evident in the relationships between sports franchises or stars and their fans. A sports team winning the title doesn’t materially benefit its fans; the fans get neither money nor rings, and in reality will likely spend more money to buy championship related paraphrenelia. The possibility of a victorious sports team’s substantial impact on the local economy as motivation is unlikely, because intuitively this is not why fans follow teams; no true fan watches a baseball game in the hopes that a victory will give his city more money. Instead, fans receive a certain abstract feeling of happiness and success stemming from the knowledge that they have supported a winning team, the feeling that in a sense they, too, are winners. This sort of attachment is not necessarily limited geographically. A fan on one side of the country may be wholeheartedly devoted, for what could be arbitrary reasons, to a team on the other.

Fans follow the ups and downs of their teams as best they can, listening to radio, watching the television, reading the sports page the next day.

The advent of the internet produced to substantial increases in both the amount of information available and the speed with which this information could be obtained. More accurately, the internet has led to an increase in the availability of specific information that appeals only to a relatively limited base. Traditional information sources such as newspapers and the television news are generally devoted to broader issues of interest to greater amounts of people, such as politics or criminal activity; periodically they may run articles or segments on products or more specific events, but these are few and far between, and could hardly be considered consistently devoted to these subjects. In print, magazines devoted to more obscure niche topics such as Apple computers and Playstations are necessarily few in number, and also importantly not free. Someone very devoted may subscribe to or purchase these magazines, but the vast majority of individuals do not care enough about such specific and limited subjects to spend money merely to hear news about them.

The internet solves this problem by lowering the minimum amount of effort required to receive up to date information about practically any topic one may care about. Beginning early on with fan pages and news sites devoted to niche subjects, this easy level of access has further exploded with the development of RSS feeds and blogs that constantly aggregate information into centralized sources; in many cases, a fan may receive the information he wants right on his home page without even having to search for it.

The end result of this development is that it is now significantly easier for a fan to follow and thus care about a given subject. Where previously information was only available if you went to a bookstore and paid for it, now it comes freely and automatically, and subsequently it is possible for more people to feel more attached to anything they may choose to follow. This has led to fans relating to practically anything in the manner of sports teams, ranging from products to companies themselves; the most applicable recent examples of these phenomenons, in my mind, have been the Nintendo Wii/Sony Playstation 3 debate and Apple. Wii and PS3 fans respectively deride the PS3 and Wii, while Apple fans adore the products of their company above all others (especially Microsoft). By no means do I imply that everyone interested in these subjects is so partisan; merely that substantial numbers are.

Recently, the front page of Digg has featured posts on these topics on practically a daily basis; the most relevant articles for the purposes of this discussion are those that either discuss the sales levels of products related to these topics, or those that feature “experts” expressing their opinions on these products. These articles are rarely interesting or notable in and of themselves (The PS3 is having bad sales while the Wii isn’t? Fascinating.), and one gets the impression that they are instead posted as fodder in an eternal struggle for dominance. They are used essentially as evidence of the superiority of one’s position; a fan can say “see, everyone believes the product I support is better,” or “see, this expert has salient points regarding why the product I support is better.” Inevitably this leads to comment threads in which people alternatively express their delight with these findings or deride their validity/relevance, with the majority “digging down” the comments of the minority so that they can no longer easily be read. What this says about the nature of democracy and ideological tolerance is fairly troubling, but I digress. What it comes down to is an enduring pissing match between sides that are either attempting to prove themselves victorious or already believe themselves victorious and are rubbing it in.

The key point here is that in this day and age, people love products to the extent that they want the products to “win,” and feel extremely satisfied when they feel this has occurred. This has in a large part been facilitated by the easy availability of information they can use the support their positions. Even in the days of yore, the comparable SNES versus Sega Genesis debate was hardly as partisan as those found now, largely because it was practically impossible to find data that one could use to support one over the other; sales data and “expert” comparisons were buried in physical magazines and corporate releases, while today such information can be obtained by anyone with access to Google (namely, everyone). The prime characteristic of the age of vicariousness is that competing products and companies have transformed into competing ideologies, with fans that have developed personal emotional stakes in the performances of their sides. This probably has some detrimental effect on the quality of available discussions; detractors are ignorant and ignored while supporters are fanboys, with neither appreciating or even considering the merits of the other side.