Set Preferences
In his inaugural “Dork Talk” column for The Guardian, Stephen Fry talked about something I’ve been mulling over for the last little while:
Very little is as mutually exclusive as we seem to find it convenient to imagine. In our culture we are becoming more and more fixated with an “it’s one thing or the other” mentality. You like Thai food? But what’s wrong with Italian? Woah, there… calm down. I like both. Yes. It can be done.
It’s always tempting to make jokes about how computer folks are binary thinkers (har de har har), but the sad joke is that most people think that way, computers notwithstanding. I don’t think we can blame the digital age for “you’re either with me or against me” thought patterns. And those who don’t generally think that way, whether naturally or with effort, get treated with some degree of suspicion.
This is something I run into professionally, not incredibly often but still enough to notice, and it’s frustrating when I do. The only slightly exaggerated version is:
“Hey, do you use Dreamweaver?”
“Nope.”
“Why? What do you have against Dreamweaver?”
If that seems outré, replace “use Dreamweaver” with something else, like “run Linux” or “watch Fox News” or “drive a Chevrolet”.
I wish I could write in 500-foot flaming letters across the skies of every country of the world in localized translations: An expression of preference does not equate criticism of differing preferences. It’s really that simple. My lack of using or doing or watching or liking X does not mean I think people who use or do or watch or like X are subhuman air-wasters, let alone that I claim such a position.
If more people really understood that statement and used it as a principle of daily interaction, I think we’d all be a lot less tense.
