People love being first. I don’t know why, but we value people being first or doing things for the first time. Explorers and inventors have long been the recipient of that reward, because their firsts contributed something to the greater society. But it seems we’ve carried that mentality into today’s society, where firsts are relative or unimportant. We value the first person to know about a band, or the first person to know something.
The problem is that our value of firsts had to bridge the gap between a material culture and an information culture. It didn’t do this very well, and we now have people commenting on blogs with “First!” in order to prove that they did in fact see it before you did. Isn’t being first grand?