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05/24/2013 08:38:53 Daily, September 05Apple iPhone Outsells All Smartphones In U.S. In July
 | InformationWeek Daily - Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2007 |
 Should Linux Users Lead From The Heart?
After my last post about who uses Linux and really prefers to stick with it, I received a remarkable number of comments from people who'd not only tried it and stuck with it, but had taken as many other people as they could with them. That got me thinking: What's the best way to evangelize Linux?
From what I can tell, the best way to do it is by example, and not by simple logical arguments -- because logic alone often won't cut it.
I'm a bit of a science buff, especially when it surfaces in ways that we can connect with our daily lives. A while back the Science section of the New York Times ran a piece, "A Shocker: Partisan Thought is Unconscious," where neuroscientists used MRI imaging to show what happened to people who had firm beliefs about a given political candidate when they were shown information that contradicted their sympathies. The scientists noticed that the people being studied employed a section of the brain called the cingulated (no, not Cingular), which kicks in when the brain makes judgments for emotions such as forgiveness. In short, if you have strongly-defended beliefs, they're often defended internally with emotion, even if they're also supported outwardly with reasoning.
I shouldn't completely discount the power of logic here. There are probably plenty of people who made their switch to Linux rationally and don't have an emotional investment in their computers or their OSes. If you ask me, that's how it should be -- a computer's a tool, and to get emotional about whether this hammer is better than that one is faintly foolish. But we're human, and emotions come into a lot of things when we least expect them.
I'm reminded of a Slashdot commenter who described trying to sell an organization on Linux, but the people he talked to kept giggling at the names "Ubuntu" and "Feisty Fawn." Hey, it happens.
Read the rest of my blog post and leave a comment.
Serdar Yegulalp
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"The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a little." -- Joe Martin
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