A Hunch survey -- and a clever infographic -- offer an antidote to reductive name-calling

Click to see the full infographic. Source: Hunch.

In the polarizing discourse of the Internet, people who prefer Microsoft (MSFT) Windows PCs over Apple (AAPL) Macs and vice versa slip easily into a kind of high-tech intolerance, trading insults like schoolchildren and dividing the world into mactards and wintards.

That's what's so refreshing about the infographic released Friday by Hunch, a crowd-sourced recommendation website spearheaded by Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flikr. Rather than reducing to one-word insults what are, after all, real differences between the two main computer camps, it takes an expansive approach, comparing the preferences of self-identified PC and Mac people in everything from softdrinks to cable TV networks.

The survey is a follow-up on a 2009 "taste graph" that looked for affinities in 76,000 responses to a simple query: "Mac or PC?" By April, the same question had nearly 400,000 responses that could be mapped against the nearly 80 million "Teach Hunch About You" questions that have been answered on Hunch to date.

The infographic is the work of Column Five Media. Click here to see it in its full glory.

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[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]