Mayayana
| 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.