sonicbloom

futurejournalismproject:

ReadWrite’s Dan Lyons points to a disturbing trend in tech journalism as he tries to unwrap why iPhones have such significant US marketshare while the rest of the world runs 75% Android.

Android, goes a coverage tick, is for poor people:

But Apple and its cheerleaders in the States don’t just criticize Android phones; they also criticize Android users, depicting them as low-class people who are uneducated, poor, cheap and too lacking in “taste” (a favorite Apple fanboy word) to pay for an Apple product and instead willing to settle for a low-price knockoff.

See, for example, a recent story by Sam Biddle on Gizmodo called “Android Is Popular Because It’s Cheap, Not Because It’s Good,” illustrated with a photo of a homeless man sleeping next to a shopping cart and bags full of collected cans. Nice touch!… Apparently inspired by this article, John Biggs of TechCrunch picked up the “Android is cheap” meme and ran with it too…

…[I]n America, a noisy chorus of pro-Apple bloggers keeps repeating the mantra about Android being cheap and crappy and second-rate, and people keep believing it and insisting that they must have an iPhone. American consumers have been told that those Android smartphones are hard to use, or complicated, or geeky, or unreliable, and, worst of all, on top of all that, they’re made for poor people. 

And that’s where the rhetoric starts to border on something ugly. Look at what Apple fans were saying in April 2012 when Instagram became available on Android. Cult of Mac had a nice roundup which included sneering tweets about Walmart and “poor peasants” and “riff raff” and “poor people,” but also included these:

• “It’s like when all the ghetto people started coming to the nice suburbs. Instagram was our nice lil suburb.”
• “Instagram just got a whole lotta ghetto.”

The italics are mine, and I’ve added them for a reason. Yes, it’s the dreaded G word, and it comes up again in a Dec. 13, 2011 article by Glenn Derene, who wrote that “Android’s Cheap, Low Quality Apps Make It Feel Like A Technological Ghetto.”

Related: Henry Blodget, founder of Business Insider, writes about the horrors of flying economy. Evidently, he couldn’t charge his laptop, there was no wifi and the food was bad.