sxsw 2008

You've never seen a group of programmers and designers flip out over someone like they did over Peter Semmelhack, CEO of open-source gadget company Bug Labs, at SXSW this morning. (That is, unless you were at Jonathan Coulton's show at the PopSci.com party last night. Grown men pulling their thinning hair and jumping up and down, that sort of thing. But Semmelhack's crowd came close, and they were sober.)

In today's gadget blogosphere, there are few if any new products that aren't upon release subjected to an immediate "unboxing"--a thorough and, some may say, pathologically obsessive series of photographs documenting exactly what is implied by the name: taking a shiny new object out of its multiple layers of packaging, step by exhaustive step.

For those leaning more toward the "pathologically obsessive" reasoning here (there are in fact entire blogs dedicated to the practice), the question is: Why does this happen?