It's dumb, but it is what it is, and people wrap an awful lot of their identity up in their chosen tribe rather than just being themselves.
> It's dumb, but it is what it is, and people wrap an awful lot of their identity up in their chosen tribe rather than just being themselves.
Cough. Written on Hacker News, but not Reddit or Digg or Facebook. Cough.
C’mon, we’re sitting right in the middle of a tribe. Even writing that Sennheisers sound better is sending a tribal signal. That’s why people write it instead of just buying a pair and listening to them in private.
FWIW, I have a $20 pair of Sony unknown model # headphones I picked up at Ross. I bought them because they were over ear and cheap not because they're white, have Sony logos on them, or because I wanted to make a statement about what group I'm in or not in.
But yeah, HN is also very group membership oriented and people spend extraordinary amount of time to build things with things that signal that they're part of this group. The trope is "yet another photo sharing app" right?
That's utter fear driven rubbish. Humans survive and thrive all the time without joining a group.
There are some survivalists who may or may not be able to operate for a while on this basis, but even if they aren’t “joining” a tribe, they are protected by tribes. get rid of all the tribes, and new ones would spring up and we’d be back to this.
The largest tribe is currently that which accepts a commonly defined currency in exchange for providing value of some sort.
It's hard to argue that this same motivation isn't driving sales of iPhones over Android and vice versa. Or Canon versus Nikon. Nike versus Adidas. Harvard versus Stanford. Obama versus (!Obama). Ford versus Toyota. We can rationalise many of these decisions, but so can the people who bought the other thing.
But it's also one of those things that, whenever you see it, is a reminder that humans have a long way to go and aren't as different from the rest of the animals as they'd like to believe.
Why Apple purchased beats, is that it helps tie together several different social tribes, with Apple now able to try to cross-sell between them, something very hard to do.
I think you're confusing the two.
If you've never had a non-inter-group interaction, then I feel terribly sorry for you. For most people, that's the normal mode of interaction.
I stated the group identity replaces and/or subsumes personal identity.
You replied, "How is that personal identity formed, if not by social interaction? I think the dichotomy you refer to is illusory." I believe this indicates that you think all collections of people are "groups" regardless of the way that they formed, the size and any notion of in-group out-group membership status.
So I replied "social interaction != group membership"
To which you replied "I don't think the two are dissociable" which reinforced my understanding of your previous statement -- that you believe all collections of people, regardless of the size or reason for their formation, are interchangeable. A society = team = club = class = mob = airplane full of people = global population = tribe = clan = family = nation = citizenry = company = group = like-working tradesmen = guild = union = etc.
My claim is that this is patently absurd and a remarkably oversimplified model of how the world works, one that's so wrong as to be virtually non-functional. It doesn't provide any workable estimates or cause-effect relationship that apply even trivially across almost any pair of those words. We've decided that these things are so different that we even give them different words, definitions, legal status, philosophies, fields of study, and so on. In fact it's unusual when any of these two words even start to smell like the same thing.
For example, a team doesn't play a game against a tribe, people don't organize labor into a citizenry, a train-car full of people aren't a global population, a nation-state isn't a guild.
These concepts are vastly different and any model that conflates them is so useless as to not be considered.
Most of those "collections of people" lead to certain behaviors, simply from the fact that people self-evaluate and even construct their identity based on their membership and hierarchic position in them.
When you can have a feeling of belonging or not belong, social incentives to reject those not belonging, feelings of pride in your actions as a group, etc, you have a social group, be it a tribe, a company or a family.
Self-categorization theory explains how these groups are formed, and why they are a social group, and not just a random collection of people.
Of course, some people might have a more defined personal identity than others, but those are outliers. The vast majority of humans define their self based on groups that are important to them (with parents/family usually being dominant, followed by friends and culture).
Basically, I'd argue there is not much self left if you take away the different group identities.