status as skill possession

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.

Trendwatching also claims that “status is to be had in many more ways than leading a somewhat dated lifestyle centered on hoarding as many branded, luxury goods as possible”, which I agree with completely, but that doesn’t mean I think luxury goods have diminished one bit (I saw “organic” Rice Krispies at Safeway the other day), just that they’re being “rebranded” to cater to consumer demand for slow food, locally produced, sweatshop-free, etc. goods. Which of course are probably exactly 0% more slow, local, or sweatshop-free than their predecessors.

Technorati Tags: status, cultural competency