Counter-Cultural Culture
I’ve decided that Digg is full of a bunch of people obsessed with being counterflow on everything for the sake of the “coolness” it provides. When you look at the story flow recently, it’s been nearly obsessively focused on getting Ron Paul and Mike Gravel listed and recognized as front-runners for the 2008 election, while their popularity poll numbers have them ranked below “Someone Else” in most polls.
Then, I read through the comments about a beer article, and they’re filled with a bunch of “your favorite mainstream beer brand sucks because you don’t know about my favorite unknown beer brand.” Note that “mainstream” includes microbrews that have national or major-regional exposure. Somebody even eliminated the entire east coast from having decent beers.
Then, you add on the Ubuntu fanboyism, and then meta-fanboyism of hating the emerging thing to be a fanboy of, so that you look cool fanboying something else.
It seems like the web is breeding “information snobs” that feel they have researched everything in the world and honestly know everything about a select group of issues. They then scorn the major distributors of information for forgetting to include the marginal details that fuel their elitism.
This seems to be going strong in the medical field, as well, where patients are talking back to their doctors because they took a 10 question test on WebMD sponsored by some prescription drug company.
But as for me, you all don’t even understand how good I am at picking things to consume! I should start a blog to trumpet the things I like and you don’t know about!