Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

Our social life has become an outward indication of our social status.

The always insightful Jonah Lehrer makes this point in his recent post, Connectivity and Status Anxiety:

The web has, in part, turned our social world into a positional good. Consider a fancy watch. When someone wears a Rolex, they don't get a more accurate sense of time. Instead, they get an object that signals their social position. At the same time, they effectively raise the expectations of everybody wearing less expensive watches.
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A similar thing is happening with social networks. We're always noticing the person who has more of what we crave, be it friends or followers or page views.

Traditionally people have used objects and possessions to demonstrate social status. Whether it's the Rolex watch, the Cadillac, or the Manolo Blahniks. There are status experiences - the trip to Paris, the African safari, the ride with the cosmonauts. And there's even status knowledge, your expertise in Opera, Italian wine, or maybe even Ruby on Rails (within the right circles).

Now our social lives are measured in equally explicit ways. Every social behavior online has a clear, and often public, metric assigned to it: friends, followers, subscribers, etc. And these numbers are worn online like the Rolex watch at a cocktail party. They create anxiety. They create ambition.

I'm not sure what the lesson is, but it's fascinating to think that this is the first time humans have seen their effectiveness as social beings measured in such a conscious way.

Certainly it's debatable whether or not these numbers measure the quality of your social life, but never the less they create a new kind of status and new pressures and aspirations for our social lives.