Your Leopard is Eating My Self-Esteem
An anthropologist would have a field day with the comments on my post yesterday (66 comments at the time of writing – that is freaky) about the problems I’ve had with installing Leopard. What’s been particularly striking is a) how many people seem to need to believe that I’m making stuff up (to generate traffic, I suppose – a claim that would be laughable to my regular readers), b) how many people seem to need to believe that Leopard is perfect, or at least needs to have its honour defended, c) how people will ignore perfectly rational explanations and obvious conclusions of fact in order to defend Apple, and (presumably) the choices they’ve made, and d) how people will abandon common sense and civility in order to present themselves (seemingly at almost all costs) as the alpha Apple fan in the crowd. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some folks have too much of their self-esteem tied up in their choice to use a Mac. In one sense, it’s a miracle of branding, and another remarkable accomplishment by Apple. But in another, yet another troubling insight into the Web.
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Seems like Apple has gone beyond a brand to become a (pick 1): cult, political cause, religion.
So much so that its: victims, members, followers – often lose objectivity. That shows up in the frenzy to buy new products, the willingness to pay a premium over the competition, and how personally buyers take any less than positive comment.
Sort of like the Bush administration – never let the facts interfere with your cause.
Agreed. There are no facts. There is only one’s voice. And the Tao of Steve.
Rob … yes, watching the spectacle of the responses to your post provided fascinating insights into human behavior. A number of things struck me. While your Leopard post is potentially useful to others engaging in the same upgrade, I found the post to be less compelling than many of your sharp, witty, and direct political or social insights. Yet, you never get this kind of response to, say, observations about American politics or media regulation. Perhaps it’s simply harder to engage those topics. I mean, many of the comments you received yesterday are emotional, off-the-cuff and self-serving responses. They do not contribute to either helping you (and others) resolve your situation or preventing problems with Leopard from happening in the future. They don’t contribute to the conversation you started.
But, what truly amazed me was the number of people who commented who aren’t regular participants in your blog. Moreover, the bravado expressed in the posts, covered by the anonymous, unattributed names (ie no links to websites or blogs) exemplifies the lack of civility on the web. These are hit and run comments … and you weren’t the only target. Commenters started taking on each other.
You’ve written about this before, of course … including posts about the childishness of the web and anonymity on the web.
Where are yesterday’s commenters now? You’ve asked us to reflect on what happened here yesterday and the participants are nowhere to be seen.
(I’m curious: do you think that the technology blogosphere is particularly prone to a lack of civility? I typically participate in the academic blogosphere. While people disagree there — disagree a lot — I can’t remember the last time an accusation of retardation was the response to someone’s post.)
Wow, crazy thread. I almost commented, I had that same thing where it didn’t recognize my drive, then it did magically later from disk utility. I didn’t correct permissions, which incidentally is basically never the problem with anything, but is easy enough and looks important so people attribute it to any problem they encounter…
Someone commented about where all the commenters are, from the other article, who don’t appear to be here now. Well, one thing you’ve got to realize is that articles that get “advertised” get comments and “hits”. If the article is not advertised (to the right demographic), you get nothing. It’s that simple. The other article got compiled (and shown) on a major aggregator of Macintosh news. So (and *very simply*) it got a lot of eyeballs and those eyeballs came over here (with simply one click).
Now, since that demographic consists of many long-time and knowledgeable users of this particular system (i.e., the Macintosh), you’re going to get a lot of comments from those who know that what is presented here is like making a case that the flesh-eating bacteria (or virus, whatever it is…) is going to wipe out 3/4 of the population of the United States, because you report one or two cases. Sure, it’s serious to those one or two or three that have that infection and they die, but the rest of the population doesn’t even have to spend two seconds worrying about it. It’s nothing in the grand scheme of things and as pertains to our population in the U.S.
So, what’s going on here is an absolute “nothing” in the grand scheme, almost not deserving a mere “blip” on the “radar screens”. So what…, a few people here and there have a few problems while the vast and overwhelming majority have absolutely nothing happen. To put it all in perspective, for all the people who have no problem and those who have a problem, it’s about 1,000% overkill to write even five words, detailing any of it. The only use for any of this is for some arcane and geek-laden database, for those who like to pore over details that the vast majority of Macintosh could care less about, much less spend any time or discussion on it.
For those who do like to pore over these kinds of arcane, freaky-geeky details, I’m sure it’s as exciting as having an orgasm (for them… LOL!). But for the normal Macintosh crowd, it’s totally useless.
So, these kinds of things belong in the geeky, shadowy files, to be drudged up, once in a long while, when someone “catches” a problem, which happens about as often as the flesh-eating virus hits people in this country.
What a lot of these previous commenters know is that too many people make “mountains out of molehills (more like nano-hills) trying to make things out to be something out of nothing (as pertains to the vast majority of Macintosh users), also trying to make it seems that it is something “rampant” (by implication and reading between the lines), as if the rest of the people in the Mac universe have to even waste one brain synapse in the process of thinking about it. They don’t.
All they have to do is simply follow intelligent and rational procedures for updating and upgrading, which involves the very sensible process of doing backups (which I find most of these kinds of complainers never do). If things don’t work out at first, do a restore and you’re right back to a normal system, which enables one to check out a few things on their system to see if they’ve screwed something up. Or it allows one to wait for a bit, while some geeky-techs work on some solutions, while they are holed up in their rooms for days at a time. Why waste one bit of time worrying about that stuff when you have geeks who love to fret over one line of code for days on end… LOL!
It’s like Macintosh users ever worrying about viruses and worms, like they’re ever going to get up to 100,000 plus like they are in the Windows world. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about, in that regard, although for years on end, those so-called security and geeky-virus experts have assured the Macintosh users that they’re going to have the same kinds of problems that Windows users have. Well, maybe one of these “centuries” (in the year 2525), it may happen. In the meantime — once again — don’t waste one brain cell or one synapse even thinking about it. LOL!
It’s the same thing with this kind of stuff, not worth anything more than getting hits on a web page — and nothing much more than that…
Eliakim … I am completely fascinated by your response. If I read you correctly, you are suggesting that what we saw yesterday was akin to a flash mob. Thinking about this a little more, I am left to conclude that the ’social internet’ is not nearly as social as I presumed. Sure, 80 comments were put on Rob’s blog … but as quickly as that group formed, it was gone. The community evaporated. The ’story’ of Rob’s computer problems was a one time experience … follow-up posts added nothing … the conversation ended as quickly as it began. Or, perhaps it is better to say that the conversation continues, but with a completely different group of participants.
Well, I’m not sure about the definition of social, actually, in context of what the Internet makes it. I think the Internet makes it a lot more possible for one to be “social” in the group they want to be social in and exclude everyone else. In “real life” that’s harder to accomplish, so there’s a melting-pot effect, of sorts. On the Internet, it’s not necessary to even consider anyone else’s opinions, other than to rail at them – LOL! On the Internet you can easily find your “like-minded people”. So, perhaps the Internet segregates far more than anything else we have had in society. the al-Qaeda people can talk to other al-Qaeda, the KKK can talk to other KKK, the child molesters can talk to other child molesters and so on. And then finally, the normal can talk to the normal — except by the time we get to the “normal” we find there aren’t any.
So, you got a crowd of Macintosh users who jumped right in and jumped out again. That’s how I got here, except that yesterday I started clicking some other links and got “here” — of all things!
As far as the follow-up posts adding nothing, I would say that’s questionable to say that. I mean, if you read in there, you’ll see that some wrote about 1Password, which is a fine program. And, if I read correctly, I think someone outlined a “situation” in which the password file in Macintosh did something in such a way that one had to be aware of. And then, I saw some fine comments which everyone should follow all the time, which is to never do any kind of upgrade of any kind, without always doing a backup and then also checking the backup to make sure it’s fully bootable. In addition, I also saw some mentioning checking a few other things.
I do all those things and never, ever move ahead on any kind of upgrade of *any kind* without ever checking all aspects of the operating system, the disk, the permissions, having a full and ready back-up, having a “user folder” back-up in addition (makes some things easier), and then, if you follow a few other recommended procedures, you would also disable all start-up operations and any items which have modified programs first, and put them back into their pristine state, and then do your upgrade.
As a last note, if you (anyone who has a Macintosh, that is) goes to the “Take Control” e-books (put out by Adam Engst of TibBits fame), you’ll find a selection of Leopard books which will step you through many things. It’s at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/
These are the types of things for people to do, when they do upgrades and then you don’t run into the “meltdowns” that will cause “hundreds” of hours of time. I mean, it only takes a vastly shorter amount of time to restore and be in quick working order again, from one’s back-up — or else, simply hook the back-up onto the computer and boot from it and be up and running in mere seconds (from some problem on your disk while doing an install).
The fact of the matter is that the problems that occur are really not the installer program’s problem or Apple’s or the new operating system’s problem. It’s *mainly* the problem of either hard drive problems (that the user blithely ignores in happy ignorance), errors that have occurred in some files since the users has been using it for a long time and now does an upgrade, or problems in file structures that the user has ignored (or didn’t even bother checking), or problems in some of the programs that the user has installed, which has altered the state of the system or programs that are upgraded. And then, people expect Apple or the installer program to correct all their mistakes and/or multitudes of installations and/or errors that they have ignored, which have crept in through their own usage.
That’s why this is ridiculous to make this out to be anything more than an anomaly and why so many other Macintosh users jumped on it. They know different(ly), besides “thinking different”.
Hi Rob,
I definitely feel your pain, having experienced it for myself. Most Apple fans aren’t interested in reading the details, holding a civil conversations, or hear a negative word said about Apple. Leaving a link to my comments for your enjoyment(delete if you need to): http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/11/apples-social-media-hell-why-it-needs-to-repent.html#comments
Good luck to you!
Andy