What-EVER!!

My colleague Dan L. sent me the article below, thinking it somehow might apply to me?? I don't know. Apple/PC, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the use of terms found in readings on Byzantine monasticism -- I don't see the connection. Anyway, I thought I'd share excerpts:

The Thin Skin of Apple Fans
By DAN MITCHELL; NYTimes, March 22, 2008

Farhad Manjoo, a writer for Salon, argues that “new communications technologies are loosening the culture’s grip on what people once called ‘objective reality.’” He looks at an area where facts often become particularly slippery...Apple.

“Last year, I praised the iPhone in something of the way Romeo once praised Juliet: The device, I said '...marks a new way of life. One day we’ll all have iPhones, or things that aim to do what this first one does, and your life will be better for it.’ ”

But because he mentioned that the phone was a bit pricey, “several readers alleged that I was an Apple-hater.” One wrote him to ask, “Does Salon actually pay you or are you being paid under the table by rival companies?”

Anybody who has ever written about Apple products will tell the same story — introducing even a hint of negativity into a review or article will bring down the wrath of Apple’s most fanatical fans.

What explains this? Mr. Manjoo cites a study...that measured perceptions of media bias relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. People who held strong opinions on the conflict going in were more apt to perceive bias in news accounts. Pro-Palestinian subjects saw a pro-Israel bias, and vice versa.

“Psychologists call this the ‘hostile media phenomenon,’ and it goes far in explaining how both Apple and PC folks can see the opposite bias in the same news story.”

But the phenomenon is particularly stark when it comes to opinionated reviews — however laudatory — of Apple products. That’s because many Apple fans “care little for honest opinion,” Mr. Manjoo writes. “They want to pick up the paper and see in it a reflection of their own nearly religious zeal for the thing they love. They don’t want a review. They want a hagiography.”