Friday, February 24, 2012

The internet and its opinions and cliques

NOTE: Everything in this is related to the "technology"/"development" "community" roaming the twitters and the blogs and the forums and the mailing lists

The Internet is a strange beast. It seems to form opinions. Even though there are millions of people using it, and millions of people chattering and reading, popular opinions seem to rise up, and unpopular opinions seem to get lost.

It's like a sort of a crowd effect - you know, the kind of thing where a crowd of people get together, get all hysterical and then kill some "outsiders" because they walk funny or sit strange or whatever.

This has been going on throughout human history. Crowds do strange things to us. They immediately create an "us" and "them" effect. Now I'm no evolutionary biologist, but I would presume it's got something to do with survival. People are quite receptive to "anti-them" sentiment, so much so that some of the worst atrocities in human history have been commited by powerful dictators stirring up and feeding on this sentiment.

And the fact is, these "outsiders" are classified not by any sort of objective assesment - it's simply hearsay that forms these opinions. And the opinions rise up, because they are powerful.

Ok, so enough with the abstract. What am I getting at?

Well, I feel the same things happens on the discussion channels on the Internet. The Internet is a quick moving thing - so quick in fact that it's hard to keep up. So the time to produce and consume information is limited. In fact, some forums of communication even have a strict 140 character limit!

This all lends itself to the fact that these "anti-them" and "pro-us" sentiment get the most attention, because they are the most powerful. They also tend to rise up, and become stronger and stronger over time. You see this a lot in technology discussions. An opinion by someone may start out like "I think x is better than y because of a and b". Then this gets disseminated into the big wide Internets, and then people either agree or disagree.

Now the very nature of the forums (I'm looking at you twitter) is that you need to be quick to respond. You also need to be short (there is after all a hard limit to the amount of characters you can send). This results in, not discussion, but bashing, or confirmation.

It is much easier to say "Yes! I agree with John that x is better!" or "No! John is wrong, x sucks." then to actually take on the arguments and reflect on them. This process then repeats and repeats, and in my opinion, you end up with camps. Little cliques who are vehemently pro-something or anti-something-else.

Now, I guess its human nature to form camps. To try and surround ourselves with people with similair ideas and notions. This is not conductive to argumentation or improvement though. And I feel that discussions on the Internet fall into this trap a lot.

So can we please stop putting ourselves in camps?

I don't think theres any point into forming these cliques. Its not conductive to open discussion, or learning in general. Just saying "x sucks" makes you blind to x. It doesn't make you knowledgable. You don't need to protect yourself by dissing "x" because you're afraid that you only know "y". You also don't necessarily need to always pronounce the pros of "y" at all costs. It's all good. We're all humans. There's no need for camps.

So, let's start getting rid of our cliques and our camps. Let's embrace the things that we like, but don't try to evangelise them. Let's also not be so afraid of things we don't like or know, that we completely diss them out of hand.

I'll start: Hi, my name is Nico. And I am a programmer, with opinions.
  • I like dynamic typing - even though I understand and see the merits in static typing
  • I like javascript for the server - even though I don't pretend that it's the next coming of Jesus Christ. it is still javascript after all
  • I dislike the boilerplate in Java - even though I understand the power of the community around that language
  • I've always loved python since I started using it - even though I think the python lambdas don't really work
  • I like Linux - even though I still play my games in Windows.
  • I love programming with functions - even though I realise that OO is still the predominant paradigm
  • I prefer closures over objects - even though I realise that an object is a closure, and a closure is an object

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