So I’m working on a project about celebrity use of Twitter. Here are a few recent tools I’ve found to be endlessly entertaining when looking at celebs, status, and social norms on Twitter:
Who Celebs Tweet, with the tagline: Have they tweeted you? I find this the most interesting because they have a very clear demarcation between who is a celeb and who isn’t. Like, according to them, Heidi Montag is not a celeb. I don’t necessarily think she should be a celeb, but to deny that she’s famous seems odd. Maybe the proprietors never read the tabloids.
TweetingTooHard.com - this is sort of like Texts From Last Night minus all the drunk skulduggery and adding a lot of self-aggrandizing obnoxiousness. Tops now is “fan belt light came on in the 911 so now I’m driving the Cayenne Turbo S - the backup, backup car. Trying not to think about the Tesla…” That’s pretty bad.
Truth Tweet attempts to verify celebrity Twitter accounts, using all sorts of sources to do so. Extremely useful for my purposes (e.g. nerdily making lists of what signals celebrity “authenticity” on Twitter).
Tumblarity is a metric that measures one’s popularity, or degree of Tumblr-ness, depending on who you ask. It’s displayed on a nifty stats page modeled after The Feltron Report. Tumblr hasn’t revealed exactly what it uses to calculate this number, but it certainly includes number of posts, followers, likes, and reblogs. My Tumblarity is 3 (which is very, very sad, in case you’re wondering), but if it were higher, I could see where I rank in the top 50,000 Tumblogs or in my local area.
I stole this image from download squad so you can see what a slightly better Tumblarity score looks like:
Like number of Twitter followers, Tumblarity is a quantified metric: a number that stands in for more complex social phenomena, like popularity or status. Tumblr helpfully includes leaderboards to make it extra-easy to compare Tumblarity with your friends, rivals, and frenemies, causing tech dorks pundits to complain about the “popularity contest” aspect of the feature.
A few basic things about quantified metrics:
1) They are always stand-ins for more complicated status measures. A single number cannot possibly convey the nuances involved in social status and social hierarchy (e.g. Why do so many people read your Tumblr? What group/subculture/community does it appeal to? What actions do you take to maintain this status? What does your community value that your blog provides?).
2) Techie/geek/engineer types love quantified metrics precisely because they facilitate comparison. Several of my informants talked about how Silicon Valley types love talking about VC funding and valuation because they allow people to attach clear numbers to companies in order to rank them (and convey status on their CEOs, VCs, and employees). (See also those obnoxious “30 under 30,” “100 Most Influential People in SV,” ranking lists.)
Clearly, people in general also like comparative metrics — see the high score lists at arcades, the Fortune 500, the Best Dressed list, etc.– but they’re becoming increasingly prevalent in social software (built by nerds).
3) Quantified status metrics spur competition and therefore increase user action. I’m assuming Tumblr is trying to reward certain types of behavior, which in this case is pretty obvious: Tumble a lot, follow lots of people, reblog a lot = spend more time on the site = benefit to the company.
4) Social status is an under-studied, under-rated aspect of product design and motivation for user action. This is the subject of my dissertation and I’m seeing increasingly explicit aspects of this in social software (which: yay!).
But let’s not fool ourselves that an algorithmically-generated number “is” social status. I’m sure there are tons of sub-groupings and communities on Tumblr that value different things. I’m sure the top 100 Tumblr users are popular for different reasons. I’m sure there are Tumblr conventions and social mores that mark someone as an insider or outsider, a newbie or a jaded user. There are many good business reasons for the company to boil this down to a single number, but it only tells us a little bit of the overall story. Tumblrites: ideas?
Loopt is a website and mobile app that, in the words of their website, “transforms your phone into a mobile compass. Connect with friends and get alerted when they are nearby. Share your location, photos and comments with friends and social networks. Explore places and events recommended by friends and Yelp.”
Loopt is a lot like Google Latitude: rather than voluntarily checking in to a particular venue, and broadcasting that information to a social network (the foursquare/Brightkite model), Loopt automatically tracks your location and shows that to your friends. But while Google Latitude is building a platform, Loopt is a standalone application.
My experience signing up for Loopt immediately made me uncomfortable. When you add someone on Loopt, it sends them a text message, which is much more intrusive than an easily ignorable email (the reason for this is that you don’t provide Loopt your email address right away; more on this in a bit).
While many social software applications use the term “friends” in a very generous sense (Facebook: everyone you’ve ever met), “friends” on Loopt should presumably be people you really trust rather than people you’d be comfortable with hanging out in a bar. The software doesn’t indicate this, though; it goes through your phone book/contacts list to find potential friends and suggests that you add all of them. Two people friended me back– both very close friends. And both of them, within minutes, had IMed and texted me to say that it was sort of “creepy” to see exactly where I was on a map. If all three of the people involved in this transaction found it creepy, then it’s likely to be violating some sort of social norm. (And, several days later, only one additional person has responded to my friends request.)
Friend: wait, did it check me in when I started the app?
me: i guess it must have
it says you checked in like 1 minute ago
did it send you a text ?
Friend: heh, ok. didn’t realize that would happen
me: that’s kind of annoying
While you can configure Loopt not to check you in automatically, it does so by default. Additionally, if you turn this feature off, the next time you open the application, it asks you to turn it on again (I suppose that without this auto-tracking, the app is fairly useless, but it makes it clear that the preferred behavior is auto-checkin).
There are fairly intense implications of always knowing precisely where your friends are, which is not information I would always want to have. This is particularly true when you’re talking about someone you’re dating. You wouldn’t necessarily ask your girlfriend where she is all the time, but once that information becomes available, there’s a temptation to use it. Of course, you can turn off Loopt (or Google Latitude) whenever you want, but if you usually use it, turning it off implies that you have something to hide.
Loopt also has an intriguing feature called “Loopt Mix” which connects you with people you don’t know in your neighborhood. To use it, you provide Loopt with an email address. The email address you provide will be used by random Loopt Mixers to send you messages, so Loopt says, “Make sure to remove any contact info that may have been added in your email signature!” This is an annoying user experience which signals something about possible privacy/safety violations.
The next screen gives you various options for filling out your profile: name, picture, “About Me,” age, gender, interested in networking, friendship, dating women, dating men, tags, and “featured communities” - TechCrunch, Imeem, Rock the Vote, and the National Resource Defense Council. Once you’ve filled this all out, you can view people in your area. Here’s what this looks like in practice:
In other words, this is a great example of people using social media to hook up. Loopt Mix displays your picture and info to people near you, who can then anonymously email you using the tool. The vast majority of people using this app in my area, as you can see from the second picture, are gay men (I live in San Francisco — this may differ in other cities). I’m not surprised about this; the safety issues involved in people putting their locations and pictures of themselves online are gendered, and other hook-up sites like Craigslist Casual Encounters, Adult Friend Finder, and Manhunt are overwhelmingly used by men. One Loopt Mix user’s profile recommended Grindr, which is an iPhone app specifically designed for M4M hookups — a clear sign of the audience Loopt Mix is appealing to in SF.
On the website, there’s a “journal” feature which lets you view where your friends have been over time. There is also some recommendation component, although none of my friends have shared any information yet, so I can’t evaluate this feature. If it’s entirely dependent on information provided solely by my friends– people who I’m close enough to feel comfortable with them knowing my location all the time– it won’t have comprehensiveness like Yelp or any other venue-based review database.
So what does Loopt value?
Persistent knowledge of location of friends (always-on location tracking)
Persistent self-disclosure of location
Meeting people based on location (for whatever, although in practice seems to be for sex)
The overwhelming value here is that location is a useful piece of personal information that should be revealed. I suppose this an obvious feature of locative social media, but whereas Brightkite and foursquare voluntarily ask for this information, and tie it to a specific location, Loopt’s ideal seems to be seamless location tracking. While this is certainly valuable, as with Brightkite, it’s not necessary actionable. The automatic nature of the app means that you never know whether someone wants to be “found” or not. Generally, while Loopt doesn’t prescribe social behavior, it seems likely to give rise to all sorts of etiquette/social problems if widely used. The potentially negative social implications of the technology seem to outweigh the (non-obvious) advantages of using it.
Last week, I posted my analysis of how foursquare prescribes certain types of social behavior. Next, I’m looking at two other locative media products, or “mobile social software”: Brightkite and Loopt. To simplify this comparison, I’m focusing on the iPhone applications rather than websites or applications for other platforms. (These apps are primarily made for mobile phones with GPS anyway.) I’ll also disclaim that I don’t really use these apps, so my understanding of them is based on the signup process rather than habitual use. This part discusses Brightkite; Loopt will follow in Part Three.
To recap, I’m looking at how mobile social software prescribes certain types of behavior. This isn’t to say that it causes specific behavior or that users don’t have agency. Instead, I’m interested in how locative social media has certain assumptions about social life built into the software.
Brightkite
According to their website, “Brightkite is a location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they’re up to. Depending on your privacy settings you can also meet others nearby.” The Brightkite interface is really clean, well-designed, and sleek, with great integration with the rest of the iPhone. It’s clear they’ve spent a lot of time on the product, and they claim something like two million users. (Active users or user accounts?)
Like foursquare, Brightkite users “check in” to specific venues, but can also add notes and photos. In practice, Brightkite is a combination of foursquare, Twitter, and the Flickr photostream. Here’s what this looks like on the iPhone app:
Unlike foursquare, Brightkite gives you two viewing options: friends (wherever they happen to be), or people near you (who may or may not be your friends):
The Friends stream doesn’t filter by location, so it’s more “keep up with what your friends are doing” than “go meet your friends.” The purpose of the Nearby tab seems to meet people near you, or people who frequent venues that you do, but in practice, this is difficult. Location data is most useful when a relationship has already been established; establishing a relationship based on shared location (as opposed to shared interests, or friends-of-friends) is sort of like becoming friends with the people on your hall freshman year of college. They’re fine to go to the dining hall with, but you’ll eventually want to meet people you have something in common with besides living space.
Brightkite says on one of their help pages that users can “Message, browse, and see what people are up to around your current location. View visitors at your favorite places.” So presumably Brightkite should help you find cool stuff going on around you - if Harry posts a picture of a lightsaber battle going on in Washington Square Park, and you’re two blocks away, you can hustle over and join in the wacky fun. Or, if you see that Angelina J. is always checking in at your favorite coffee shop, maybe you can offer to split a blueberry muffin with her (“I saw you on Brightkite.”).
The problem with this latter scenario is that it’s creepy. It’s non-normative social behavior. Even using Dodgeball (foursquare’s pregenitor), there were plenty of times when I went to meet a friend who had checked in to a nearby venue, only to find that they were on a date, out to brunch with their girlfriend, or otherwise engaged in a pursuit where a random additional person was uncomfortable. Smoothly navigating these scenarios with strangers seems close to impossible, let alone leading to new friendships. And location information itself is not enough; how could I use the information that “cman checked in at Williams-Sonoma 15 minutes ago”?
Because Brightkite doesn’t have a points system or a leaderboard like foursquare, it’s not as cut-and-dried to describe it as “prescriptive.” So what does Brightkite value?
Documentation (encourages users to create a persistent record of where you’ve been, with photos and notes)
Connectedness among friends (encourages frequent check ins)
Ambient awareness (being able to see what everyone on your friends list is up to)
Meeting new people based on location (through providing a “nearby” stream)
Because Brightkite is more open-ended than foursquare, it’s less prescriptive. If your interest is in self-documentation, BrightKite works very well– the addition of photos and notes allows you to put together a diary-like stream of actions. But in some ways it’s just a weaker, lesser-used Twitter/Flickr stream; the lack of local specificity for “friends” makes it harder to use for socializing, and there’s no clear use case for meeting new people. Foursquare is more prescriptive, but ultimately more useful: it’s obvious how you’re supposed to use the software. The argument amongst foursquare users that people shouldn’t check in to “home” or “work” makes this clear. Brightkite would encourage users to check in at home or work; that way, they create a persistent record of their life, and broadcast that information to friends. Foursquare, on the other hand, is based on a particular kind of action– meeting up with friends for nightlife socializing– which arguably doesn’t include “home” and “work.”
If anyone reading this is a huge Brightkite fan, I’d love to hear your experiences with it in the comments.
Today I went to a local coffee shop to eat soup and read my 40+ pages of notes (so far) on what is supposed to be a 10 page chapter of my dissertation. I’m a frequent user of the iPhone app created by foursquare, location-based social software that lets you check in to venues (restaurants, bars, clubs) and broadcast your whereabouts to a network of friends.
Foursquare is not the only software out there that does this; similar applications include BrightKite, Google Latitude, Whrrl, and Loopt. What interests me about foursquare is that it’s a terrific example of prescriptive social software: applications that encourage particular social behaviors and provide very clear rewards for behaving in the “right” way.
Let’s start with foursquare. When I “checked in” at The Grind, here’s the feedback I got:
Foursquare gives you points depending on when, where, and with who you check in, and keeps a weekly leaderboard of high scorers in each city. In this instance, I get 5 points for checking in at a new venue (don’t ask where the 22 points comes from; I didn’t check in anywhere last night after midnight [Edit: apparently this is a bug that's since been fixed]), and I’m told that Jay A. is the Mayor of The Grind, which means he’s checked in there more times than anyone else in the last 60 days.
So I go check my place in the Leaderboard:
Social butterfly Charles G. has checked in 18 times since Sunday (it’s Wednesday), with a grand total of 114 points. Naomi M. has checked in more times (20) but gotten fewer points, so she trails Mr. Charles for second place. (Don’t give up, Naomi, you’ve still got four more days!)
After a month of using foursquare, I’ve found that it rewards the following:
Going to new places : you get a 5 point bonus every time you check in somewhere new.
Going to multiple places in one day/night: 3 point “travel bonus”
Going out after staying home for a few days: “First night out in a while” bonus
Going out many nights in a row
There are also badges, which reward particular things, such as checking in at 10, 25, and 50 new venues; checking in X number of days in a row (”Bender”); checking in at X number of venues in one night (”Crunked”); checking in at the same place three times in one week (”Local”); and checking in with multiple members of the opposite sex (”Playa Please,” which I got at the Austin airport). You get fewer points for checking in somewhere you go frequently.
Given that the application presumes moving one’s way up the leaderboard is a good thing, the model of social life valued/rewarded by foursquare involves going out a lot, in urban areas, to many different venues (bars/clubs/restaurants), many days of the week (”exploring” the city, presumably with a group of suitably soused friends). This is a very urban, American, and youthful model of socialization. If you’re the kind of person who likes to stay home and play board games with your two best friends, or go to the same bar every night, or if you live in the suburbs, or if you’re done with the phase of your life when bars and clubs seemed exciting, you’re not going to find foursquare very useful, and foursquare isn’t going to encourage your type of socializing. Foursquare values going out a lot; it doesn’t place value on catching up with your reading. But then again, if you don’t like to socialize or don’t like going to bars, clubs, and restaurants, foursquare wouldn’t have much utility for you, either.
[Edit: apparently you don't get points for checking in during the day on weekdays, which obviously, prioritizes socializing at night.]
So does this prescriptive social behavior actually change people’s social behavior? While I have zero empirical evidence to believe this is true, I have plenty of anecdotal evidence, like any good blogger. A quick search on Twitter for foursquare found the following in the first page of results:
@rogersmithhotel I’ll be there, going for the local badge on @foursquare by tomorrow. Oh, and I’m mayor too :D
GushueIS: Wow i just realized I.m 1 in sf on @foursquare now i feel all this pressure to go to new places!
creasian: HAHAH I’m the new Mayor of the San Jose International Airport on playfoursquare.com !!! Sweet! #foursquare
There’s something here worth examining. What assumptions about “good” and “bad” socializing are built into social media? Locative social media is especially interesting because it directly affects how people move through the city. It can be terrifically fun and useful for people who fit its prescribed social model. Here in San Francisco, where I’m doing ethnographic work on social media users, foursquare has positively affected my social life. For example, on Monday night, I went to dinner with a friend. After dinner, I saw that two of my closest friends were at a local bar. We met them there, and over the course of the next four hours, about 10 other people showed up, all of whom found us through foursquare. Whether or not it’s wise to have a party in a bar on Monday night is arguable, but it was really fun. Likewise, last night, on my way to meet my friends at Cafe Du Nord, I detoured through Dolores Park to say hi to two friends who’d checked in there. We watched the sunset together and I went on my way.
Foursquare also contributes to ambient awareness. Like Twitter, you feel part of a group of people, but whereas you can follow anyone on Twitter, foursquare restricts the displayed information to people in your city, and friendships are bidirectional - nobody can friend you if you don’t friend them. People tend to be fairly picky about their foursquare friends, precisely because of the type of specific locative information that it provides. This creates a social map of the city - my friend Jane is at work, John is at the park, Josh is climbing, Jen is having brunch - which can be comforting and helps to provide a sense of social context.
But it’s important to remember that the social models built into social software are not value-neutral. In the second part of this post, I will look at the types of social behavior that other locative media services prescribe.
Disclaimer: I’m friends with the guys behind foursquare.
I finally signed up for tumblr, and I’m trying really hard to understand what all the fuss is about.
I often find that I have a very strong negative reaction to new trendy technologies. This is strange as I often end up using and liking them (Facebook and Twitter being prime examples, although I never took to MySpace as much as I used it). I think the best way to describe it is as a form of jealousy: I feel left out by customs I don’t understand.
Tumblr is a lot like LiveJournal, less robust but easier to use. The barrier to entry is pretty much zilch for anyone familiar with social media: sign up, drag a bookmarklet, start Tumbling things. It’s basically a blog without commentary, or a LJ without real comments. I find that I tend to post lots of pictures and quick links to Tumblr, whereas on this blog I try to post substantive entries (or at least I will now that my del.icio.us links aren’t it’s primary content), and I feel like I have to stick pretty strictly to technology. Whereas on Tumblr I feel totally comfortable posting pictures of dresses I’d like to buy or completely personal, superficial viewpoints on pop culture.
The culture of “reblogging” on Tumblr (which substitutes for commenting, although you can hack together comments with a third-party product like disqus) seems to incite a lot of drama. Basically, you can copy anything anyone else writes and add your own commentary on your own Tumblr. Then a link to that commentary shows up on the original post. This is basically exactly the same as comments on a blog or LJ. However, recently Tumblr CEO David Karp deleted a bunch of Tumblr blogs that mocked Julia Allison, justifying this as “anti-harassment,” but in reality just annoying a lot of his users (he overturned the decision two days later). Apparently Allison was annoyed that links mocking her showed up on her own blog. Finally, Tumblr introduced a “blocking” feature, which allows users to block links to reblogs. I think.
Tumblr’s culture is very young. LJ has a culture leftover from the late 90s; it’s sort of mired in netiquette and FAQs, and attracts nerdy fandom nerds and 30 somethings. Tumblr seems, from my limited perspective, to have a culture more akin to the American Apparel, no-politics-more-irony, everything is ripe for mockery hipster viewpoints of the late 00s. It’s also firmly embedded in early 20something New York and San Francisco social life (and much, much more popular in the former city).
I’m sure social status on Tumblr would make an excellent case study for the dissertation, but I still find it all a bit distasteful. I’m Tumbling away, hoping that one of these days I’ll fall in love with it like I have Twitter. So far, not so much.
I am very happy to announce the release of a major research report I wrote for LiveJournal based on an analysis of previous academic research, interviews with long-term LJ users and observation of communities and individual journals.
I was asked to answer the question “What makes LJ different?” I identified the depth of engagement between users and the substantive nature of entries and comments as the two major differences between LiveJournal and other forms of social media.
From the introduction:
LiveJournal’s present success can be attributed to what sets it apart rather than what it has in common with typical social media sites. Unlike Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, LiveJournal’s features encourage a long-term, deep engagement between users that is comparable to a real-life (usually abbreviated as “RL” on LiveJournal) conversation.
While a Twitter message (140 characters) or a Facebook status update (160 characters) is designed to be extremely brief, LiveJournal users frequently write lengthy entries that encourage and solicit substantial comments from friends. These comment threads can include dozens of people and multithreaded conversations on both personal journals and community journals. LiveJournal also has full integration with a network of friends that encourages more meaningful relationships.
Note that this was a report that LJ paid for me to do. I’m still figuring out the ethics of paid research. Some of the comments in the LJ_Research blog call me out for not mentioning events that were highly critical of the company, or heavily-populated communities that aren’t as “family friendly” as the ones I included. And I fully admit that I went through several rounds of edits with LJ to get to a point where we were all comfortable with the work. It’s an interesting conundrum. But overall, I stand behind my work and there’s nothing in the report I don’t believe in fully.
You can comment at this LJ_Research thread until I get my comments on this blog working again (re-installing the blog software and generally modernizing this from 2005’s hottest technology is on my 2009 to-do list).
I saw an excellent talk by Joseph Reagle today. Joe’s dissertation is on Wikipedia, and he presented a chapter called “Encyclopedic Anxiety,” in which he argues that reference works “often serve as a flashpoint for larger social anxieties.” This was very timely as I am half-way through David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage” from Consider the Lobster, in which Wallace riffs on class and power issues in American lexicography and grammar in general.
To make a very long story very short, Wallace outlines the debate between proponents of descriptive dictionary building (dictionaries should describe how people use the language, including terms considered non-standard or “wrong” like ain’t and irregardless) and prescriptive dictionary building (dictionaries should codify and enforce the rules of standard grammar). Clearly, what’s “right” and “wrong” are social judgments that usually reflect the interests of the class of people building the dictionary. Wallace calls these people SMOOTS; they are the copy editors of the world, often disparaged as “grammar Nazis.”
Reading this essay proved two things to me.
1) I was never formally taught grammar at any of the many educational institutions I attended, and therefore am woefully ignorant AND
2) Contentious debates about participatory culture, Web 2.0, content contribution etc. are just part of a very long struggle over Who Decides the Rules, Who Decides Whether Or Not There Should Be Rules and Who Is Allowed to Bend the Rules.
Joe places Wikipedia at the end of a long debate over reference works ranging from the first edition of Britannica (which encountered controversy for its entry on midwifery, which included illustrations of a fetus and the female pelvis), to the French Enlightenment text the Encyclopedie (which caused no end of trouble including censure, confiscation, imprisonment, and the torture and execution of a young nobleman purportedly under its influence), to Webster’s Third, a version of the unabridged dictionary seen as overly permissive and dismissed as “dogma that far transcends the limits of lexicography” (source: Wikipedia’s page on Webster’s Third). But what fascinates me is this idea of descriptive vs. prescriptive.
Descriptive vs. prescriptive is a debate that extends far beyond reference works. Any time a point of view is taken, there is a normative stance associated with it. For instance, if I write for a magazine for teenage girls that includes long articles explaining plastic surgery and bikini waxing, it is very likely that I will be seen as endorsing those practices, even if the articles themselves are neutral.
In my status project, I am examining what I’m calling status affordances: software mechanisms that enable users to be ranked or placed in some sort of social hierarchy or order. These include features like MySpace’s Top 8, Yelp’s Elite status and LiveJournal’s public Friends list. Reputation mechanisms, like eBay Feedback, Amazon reviewer rankings, and Digg’s “made popular” attribution often function as status affordances as well. Most of these mechanisms aim to be descriptive: They show which reviewer has written the most reviews, or how many friends a person has. But they are also prescriptive, in that they define what a user must do to improve his or her reputation or social status. These mechanisms operationalize whatever they’re measuring, whether it’s “trustworthiness,” “usefulness” or “coolness,”, which in turn creates a metric for that feature that makes it clear what must be done to increase one’s rank.
This means that status affordances both define and prescribe intended behavior. They create a determination of “quality” for a site’s users or contributions and determine what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior. For instance, the rank and order built into Amazon’s review system encourages people to submit thousands of reviews. Shay David and Trevor Pinch (I know I’ve cited this study before, but it’s so interesting) used custom-built software to parse existing reviews and found that hundreds were exact duplicates, modified slightly for different products. This explains how top Amazon reviewers can have more than five thousand reviews, which naturally calls into question their quality. If quantity was not a reputational mechanism, this type of behavior might not happen. Thus, descriptive mechanisms prescribe how to “game” the system.
I’m proposing a status in social media panel for SXSW Interactive 2008 (I spoke at 2007 and had a ball). Here’s my 50-word summary:
“I’m Internet Famous”: Status in Social Media
Do technologists focus on what’s cool, rather than what’s useful? Does geek chic create an echo chamber? Is Web 2.0 an insider’s game? This session explores status symbols in social media worlds (online reputation, net.celebrity, elite conferences, beta invites), inviting critical thinking about status, class, and elitism.
Right now I’m thinking I’d ideally have the following panelists:
Someone from a super-trendy startup like Pownce, Twitter, I’mInLikeWithYou
Someone who works for a very successful “outsider” company - something that’s not considered cool, but makes money from social media
Someone who organizes/attended/attends foocamp, TED, eTech, etc.
Academics working on internet memes, reputation mechanisms, eBay, “friending” strategies
An actual “internet celebrity”
Members of particular communities that have specific types of status mechanisms, such as warez, crafting, fandom, etc. who can talk about those in depth
If you fall into any of these categories, or have a suggestion for someone who does, please post in the comments!
Trendwatching identified “Status Skills” as a September 2006 trend. Basically, this means status as knowing how to do things, but specifically cool, expensive, time-consuming things, like making your own wine, being a super-excellent digital photographer, or just making cool stuff as demonstrated by MAKE magazine or GetCrafty.com. Trendwatching of course is trying to show marketers, brands, etc. how they can curry favor with consumers by helping them to attain competency in high-status areas.
Of course, demonstrating competency is and has always been a status symbol. High-status activities, for example, are often ones in which instruction is necessary. Think about sushi, which is a fairly expensive food that can only be eaten outside of the home (unless you are madly skilled and have lots of money) and requires knowledge to consume: knowing what to order, how to eat it, and having a “sophisticated” palette that doesn’t balk at raw animal proteins. It is precisely the knowledge required to “appreciate” sushi that makes it a high-status food. This is the same principle behind byzantine etiquette rituals or “high-maintainence” grooming techniques: it must be taught, and yet it is almost never taught outright, but requires observation and a friendly Pygmalion instructor (your best friend in 10th grade teaching you how to pluck your eyebrows, for example).
And the more knowledge you have about something, the higher status you can place on it. For example, running used to require basically a pair of sneakers, access to the outdoor world, and maybe some shorts. Now, serious runners are obsessive about mileage, footwear, mp3 players worn on the arm, stretches, marathon training, and as a result (or perhaps as a cause) an entire set of industries has grown up around running as an activity. When I first went to a gym in my early 20s (let’s just stay I’m not the athletic type and leave it at that), I had no idea how to use an elliptical and was incredibly intimidated by the spatial configuration of the gym, where everything you do is in public and there are almost no instructions whatsoever. Competence is assumed. One of the reasons I still avoid yoga is because I never learned how to do it, and I am too chicken to fail in front of a bunch of skinny, in-shape MILFY Bay Area or Manhattan chicks.
However, every type of cultural competency requires learning, just some more than others. If you had never, ever been to a McDonald’s before, you would probably not know how to order. But McDonald’s is constructed so that the entire space of the restaurant encourages people to behave in a certain way, the way that McDonald’s wants them to.
In most McDonalds, there are several registers, and people line up in front of each of them [Side note: have you ever been in a drugstore like Walgreens, CVS, or Bartells where people naturally form a single line that feeds into multiple cashiers? 90% of the time they have a home-made sign up saying something to the effect of "form a line at each register." The problem is that usually there's only space for one line rather than many; the space doesn't lend itself naturally to multiple lines. And when people are constantly doing the "wrong" thing, a company should wise up and figure out how to re-architect or re-organize the space (or software) so that the user does whatever the "right" thing is; or they should re-think their idea of what's "right"]. There are lots of garbage bins on the way out so people take their trays to the trash before they leave. There are uncomfortable seats so people don’t linger and the restaurant doesn’t get crowded with stragglers. And there is a big, well-lit menu so people can figure out what they want to eat before they get up to the register. We all know how frustrating it is when people wait until they get to the register to decide.
High-status locations usually do not provide as many cues to the user as to how to consume (use, eat, drive, etc.) them. The lack of usability could be explained as partly due to the fact that knowing how to use them is where their status resides.
Alternately, there can be multiple levels of “using” something: being a basic newbie user vs. a power/expert user. Many of my students, for example, don’t know that Wikipedia is editable, thus missing what most people would think of as “the point” of Wikipedia (but going a long way to explain why they see it as a totally legitimate reference source). So status can reside in obtaining the upper, “power-user” competencies of an application, place, hobby, and so forth. And this again varies. I am a hardcore Word power user, but because Word is so dorky, that doesn’t impress pretty much anyone, ever. However, if I was a really super awesome Photoshopper, I could demonstrate competency in a way that people would probably respond to positively.
Trendwatching also points out that this ties into Web 2.0 intimately:
Now, consumers can acquire as many skills as they want, but equally important is the showing-off aspect of what they’ve learned and created. Don’t forget: without ‘the others’ seeing, tasting, hearing or smelling your skills, without the inevitable story-telling, there shall not be any status coming thy way!
Some of this showing off is best done in the company of family and friends, garnering recognition from those who are closest and who matter most. But other creations are just dying to be flaunted to strangers, to the entire world, to give their creators a status fix that’s more in tune with today’s obsession with instant celebrity. In that light, the incredible numbers behind Wikipedia, blogging software, Lulu.com, PureVolume, YouTube and Flickr are not at all surprising. We’re now all skilled encyclopedia editors, writers, musicians, directors, photographers, and we want to share the fruits of our labour with a responsive audience.
Lesson learned: don’t just figure out how you can help your customers improve their skills, but also give them an intimate or worldwide outlet to show and tell and brag.
Again this is mostly exaggerated, as only about 10% of any online community is producing any kind of serious content (videos, blogs, or pictures as opposed to viewing, rating or commenting) and of that, most of it is probably garbage; perhaps there is an aspirational nature to this? And of course, just knowing how to participate in a community without actively pissing people off by violating social mores is in itself an extraordinarily valuable skill.
Alice E. Marwick (alicetiara) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. This summer I'm interning with danah boyd at Microsoft Research. I study social technology. This blog focuses on that, pop culture, communication, and media studies. Click on "About Me" for more blathering.
What is this “Fake” in the Fake Sartorialist? « threadbared But it isn’t just Web 2.0 technologies that have opened up a space in the fashion world for those outside to enter and occupy it. For the past 8 or 9 years, cheap chic fashion and democratic design have been valorized as enabling non-elite consumers to access and own the look of elite classes. The democratization of fashion ushered in a new cultural politic that values and legitimizes (some) knockoffs. It is against this political economic and cultural backdrop that the real and virtual consumption and circulation of fashion images, objects, and discourses are given new meaning.
Comment: Down with meritocracy | Politics | The Guardian Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy" as a dystopian critique, weighs in on the contemporary use of the word and how it creates a new disenfranchised underclass
Das Racist: Thanks, Internet! The three-man creators of "combination pizza hut and taco bell" reflect on the implications of internet fame and drop some science on corporate mythmaking.
How Diverse is Facebook? | overstated Fascinating report from Cameron Marlow et. al. about racial diversity on FB: It is, he says, and getting more so.
