| Facebook has been around for ages now. Is it a fad? Is Twitter a fad?
| Smartphones? Tablet computers?
| So, if you were to ask me, I would say that digital photography may have
| been a fad at one point, but soon evolved into a trend and is now
standard.
|
| Much like how I would describe Facebook, actually. :)
|
I don't see a conflict bettwen the different descriptions.
Tablets are slightly a fad. They're also a trend. I guess I'm
thinking in terms of motive. It's not a fad if it hits big and
then dies out. It's a fad because lots of people jump on
the bandwagon without thinking. Blueberries were a fad for
awhile when news came out that they contained some sort of
special antioxidant. Blueberries have always been standard
food. The fad part was that people were buying them as
part of a fashion wave. People were affected by the actions
of those around them and didn't think for themselves. In some
cases the faddists simply don't think. The "lemming" phenomenon.
In other cases I think the faddists want to be faddists. They want
to feel part of something. So it's that group-act that I think of
as the fad.
Another good example is anti-gluten. Jimmy Kimmel did a
piece recently where he asked two questions to 3 people on
the street in S. California. 1) Do you avoid gluten? All 3 said
yes. 2) What is gluten? None of the three had any idea. :)
So anti-gluten is a fad. But whether or not there's evidence
for being concerned about gluten has almost no connection
to the fad itself. Whether it blows over or whether the UN
bans wheat and barley forever, what's happening now is a fad.
I'd say cloud is a fad in that sense. Most people favor cloud
without thinking about it, simply because "that's what they've
heard". There are, of course, uses for cloud. I don't see any
reason to take sides. I criticize fads as a way to shed light on
the issue, not because I'm necessarily against the underlying
thing.
With Facebook, I'd say that's a scourge, a fad and a current
standard. Will the standard survive the death of the fad? That's
another issue. A scourge can become a standard. A beneficial
thing can be a fad that dies out.
There's been discussion lately about how Twitter will fare in
the long run. It's a silly, limited gossip site, for the most part.
It's a fad. It may or may not last. But it will have been a fad
either way.
Uber, Lyft, AirBnB? Those are clearly fads in that people are
jumping on the bandwagon and making more out of them than
they really are. Lyft may or may not be the best way to travel
in a given situation. But many people don't care about that. They
use Lyft because it's "cool". The first wave of a fad is often
characterized by what might be described as AppleSeed Syndrome:
The feeling that jumping on the bandwagon early is a sign of
thinking for oneself. :)
Smartphones are clearly a fad. They may eventually become
fully standard. I half expect to get arrested one of these days
for not having a smartphone on my person to document my
activities. It could certainly come to that. But again, what makes
them a fad is that people jump on the bandwagon without thinking.
Or to put it another way, someone with celiac disease who gives
up gluten may very well do it because of the fad. It will turn out
to be a very healthy decision for them personally. But that's
incidental. They're not thinking when they jump on the bandwagon.