Slashdot Mirror
The Psychology of Fanboys
Testiiiiing writes "CoolTechZone.com's Gundeep Hora publishes his thoughts on why fanboys act the way they do. 'For fanboys (and I use the term with utmost respect, at least for this article), their appetite to support their favorite company to beat the big, bad corporate heavyweights gets delusional at times. And why not? After all, we all like to cheer the underdog... reasonably. In addition to cheering for the little guy, fanboys also think it's their responsibility to spread the word about their favorite company. Combine their need to do marketing on behalf of their adopted companies and their products with the passion to make others see things their way, and you have a powerful group of people.'"
In its most basic and correct formulation, the goal of public relations and marketing is to disintegrate ration from action, and use autonomic responses in its place; basically, its a mechanism for controlling the will of public by means of turning them into easily trained animals.
The fanboy phenomenon is just the evolutionary extension that maintains the existing pipelines of manufactured consent, as broadcast mediums become less of a part of daily life.
Unfortunately, there is not any obvious solution to mitigate its effect. Consumer culture provides the meaning to most of the lives of citizens in industrialized societies. The genie is out of the bottle.