religious devotion to brands
I’m intrigued by how people (myself included) tend to have almost religious devotion to their OS in technology. Someone switches from Mac to PC or PC to Mac and there’s a wave of congratulations and woes. Same thing for smartphones. I wonder what it is that causes such devotion to the products we use that we feel we must defend them against other possible choices.
It’s been happening for years in the whole I’m a Mac, I’m a PC campaign, and then Windows whole “I’m ________ and I’m a PC” and you see it with Samsung’s recent ads targeting iPhone users. It’s an intriguing world where we give so much devotion to our tools.
It makes me wonder if maybe in our little economic world where we are defined by what we consume if we aren’t aware of the ways that products disciple us into devotion to their way.
Certainly in a sense we have always debated over the producers of what tools we use but this seems almost to another level, one in which our identity is tied to a specific brand.
I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but I can tell you - it makes for annoying fodder in social media conversations, quite similar to the annoyance of watching the same people debate the same political issues over and over. It all makes me wonder if this “fragmentation” of our culture and identity into different branding and political tribes doesn’t just happen to serve as an opiate to distract us from doing the actual work that needs to be done for us to move forward in our cities.
The ancient Christian Paul spoke of how in Christ there was no longer Jew or Gentile, Slave or Free, Male or Female. I wonder if it may just be that we need to be confronted with all the little things that we use to delineate from each other and be reminded that there is something bigger that ties us together than Mac or PC, Democrat or Republican, Android or iOS, Nike or Adidas.
