The Backlash Bandwagon

It always happens... The industry leader is the brand that takes criticism for the entire category. The brand's competition may very well be worse for you, but it doesn't matter because you armchair activists and podcast pundits aim for the biggest target. I'm not defending McDonald's or Microsoft, but pointing out that "anti-hype" is little more than a backlash bandwagon - based on misplaced emotion more than fact.

You can see the anti-hype around MySpace more frequently now. From the half-assed "Fox bought MySpace" panic that, in the end, only attracted millions more people to the social networking site... to this article. Let me get this straight: a site that has 70 million members is "out" because one 18-year-old out of just 400 high school students surveyed said she's done with MySpace? Can't we just admit that we're tired of stories about MySpace's dominance, instead of publishing superfluous fluff and clutter about it? I'm not defending MySpace, but wondering where our collective common sense went.

We bitch about MySpace being too big, yet we've more than doubled the site's population in the past year. We claim that we don't eat McDonald's any more, yet we actually go to the fast-food giant more often and spend more when we're there since SuperSize Me came out. We bitch about Bill Gates and Microsoft, yet somewhere around 90% of us still claim Windows as our operating system. As consumers have proven that we are lying through our teeth; that we love to complain, but we have no resolve to effect change.

Why not get off the backlash bandwagon and put your money where your mouth is, folks?

The God Delusion

I thought it appropriate to follow that last post with a quick shout-out for Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion. Pre-order it now, so you don't forget about it before the October 2006 release date.

For more info, here's a Salon interview with Dawkins from last year, about how all of America's god-mongering is pushing the country back into the Middle Ages. If you want more, here's another article in which Dawkins claims religion amounts to child abuse. Given the vast amounts of misinformation, false hope and resignation to not understand the world that religion gives us, I have to agree that it's extremely unhealthy when taught as divine truth instead of moral fiction.

To Hell With Religious Tolerance

Douglas Rushkoff moves a little further into Richard Dawkins' "anti-religion" territory with his latest post about "why the Bible is much more useful as a metaphorical guide to life than as a literal document." (quoted from BoingBoing)