Tag Archives: social status

Study shows 15 minutes of fame isn’t the case; once someone is famous, they tend to stay famous

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A new study in the American Sociological Review contradicts folk wisdom regarding people having 15 minutes of fame:

Researchers led by Eran Shor from McGill University’s department of Sociology and Arnout van de Rijt of Stony Brook University studied all the names mentioned in over 2,000 English-language newspapers from the US, Canada and the UK over a period of several decades…

Temporary celebrity is highly unusual and is to be found primarily in the bottom tiers of the fame hierarchy, such as when people like whistle blowers become famous for a limited time for participating in particular events.

This is even true of entertainment, where it might appear that fame is likely to be most ephemeral.

For example, in a random sample of 100,000 names appearing in the entertainment sections of newspapers during the period 2004-2009, the ten names that appeared most frequently were Jamie Foxx, Bill Murray, Natalie Portman, Tommy Lee Jones, Naomi Watts, Howard Hughes, Phil Spector, John Malkovich, Adrien Brody, and Steve Buscemi…

Indeed, the annual turnover in the group of famous names is very low. Ninety-six per cent of those whose names were mentioned over 100 times in the newspapers in a given year were already in the news at least three years before.

The key here seems to be the status hierarchy. There is a lot of turnover at the bottom of celebrity circles, people who pop into the news for things like winning the lottery or being involved with a particular court case. But, once you get to the top of the status hierarchy, you tend to stay there. So perhaps it is true that most people can only have 15 minutes of fame while a certain number of people each year can break through to the top levels.

Another key appears to be the media scrum regarding fame and celebrity. Aren’t they generally the ones telling Americans who is famous and who they should pay attention to? How does one break into this media world of fame? In other words, there is a whole industry built around famous people and it pays off to have recognizable celebrities as well as the occasional new people who change things up a bit.

Argument: elite colleges offer MOOCs because they can afford to

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Here is an interesting argument about MOOCs, massive open online courses, that a hot topic of discussion these days: elite colleges can offer them because they accrue status and can afford the financial losses.

Millions of people were already taking online courses in 2011, when The New York Times noticed that thousands were taking a Stanford course online. The MOOC surge has been driven by the warm feelings associated with elite American colleges. Brand equity is obviously the principal admissions criterion for edX and Coursera, and for Udacity by implication, with its pedigree of Stanford origination and Silicon Valley cool.

Ideally, this will allow elite colleges to profit from and enhance their brands at once. Penn can’t ever be Coca-Cola. Its brand is tied to the noble purpose of higher learning. If it’s seen as a crass profit-taker, the whole thing falls apart. Many observers have asked where the “business plan” is for Harvard, MIT, and other institutions leading MOOCs. That misses the point.

Elite colleges are ultimately in the business of maximizing status, not revenue. Spending a lot of money on things that return a lot of status isn’t just feasible for these institutions—it’s their basic operating principle. It’s not hard to make money when you’re already wealthy—witness the performance of the Harvard Management Company over the past 20 years. The difficult maneuver is converting money into status of the rarefied sort that elite institutions crave.

MOOCs offer that opportunity. Elite colleges are willing to run them at a loss forever, because of the good will—and thus status—they create. Free online courses whose quality matches their institutional reputation (a tall order, to be sure, but MOOC providers have strong incentives to get there) could ultimately become as important to institutional status as the traditional markers of exclusivity and scholarly prestige.

In other words, MOOCs offered by elite colleges can reinforce existing status structures where these elite schools can continue to amass resources, financial, knowledge-wise, and social status and still claim they are helping the masses. On the other hand, can takers of MOOCs use them as real stepping stones to move up in society?

The rise of misattributed quotes on the Internet, social media

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An editor at RealClearPolitics examines an erroneous online list of Mark Twain quotes and takes a broad view of quotes in the age of the Internet and social media:

The point of this example is that lists of quotes without specific and verifiable citations — where and when it appeared — are useless, and invariably rife with errors. Websites with names like “Brainyquote” and “Thinkexist.com” are essentially Internet compost piles.

In the pre-Internet days, “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” and “The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations” were the gold standards, although sometimes misattributed quotes found their way into those volumes. Much of this material is now online, but the best source of accurate quotes today is the “Yale Book of Quotations,” edited by the rigorous and charming Fred R. Shapiro.

Many of the most frequently misquoted historical figures have websites devoted to keeping the record straight for their heroes. These range from one established by a conscientious amateur Twain aficionada named Barbara Schmidt to WinstonChurchill.org, which is run by the Churchill Centre and Museum in London. The latter site even has a section called “Quotes Falsely Attributed.”

In his anthology, Shapiro goes the extra mile in tracking down the origin of erroneous quotes. Thus, he is no stranger to the misuse of quotations or even obvious forgeries. But even he was astonished at the casual speciousness of the Huffington Post inventory.

This has been a widespread issue in recent years – remember the fake MLK viral quote after the death of Osama bin Laden? While Wikipedia might have relatively good information that is regularly edited, quotations are simply floating around the Internet and social media.

I think this is tied to two other phenomena related to the Internet and social media:

1. The desire people have to find a quote that represents them. In an era of profiles and status updates, people are defined more and more by short, snappy bursts. There is simply not space to write more and who wants to read a long piece about your existence (except on blogs)? Finding the right sentence or two that sums up one’s existence or current state is a difficult task that can be aided with quotes attributed to famous figures. If you don’t want to use quotes, you can always use pictures – witness the rise of Instagram.

2. Many of these quotes are inspirational or witty. If you look at the inspirational quotes on Facebook profiles or Twitter feeds, many suggest people are continually facing and then overcoming challenges and obstacles. The overcoming-type quotes are empowering as individuals can quickly equate their challenges to some of the greatest in history. The witty quotes do something else; they suggest the user is facing life with verve and can find and wield profound words. Witty quotes can then become another status game as users try to one-up each other with piercing and whimsical takes on the world.

Perhaps this is how the average person gets to participate on a daily basis in a sound bite culture.

Zara devotes its full marketing budget to leasing expensive retail space near high-status brands

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Here is a way retailers can take advantage of space: locate near high-status stores.

How about advertising? Basically, Zara doesn’t do it. There is no ad budget. Instead, the company spends ungodly amounts of money buying storefronts next to luxury brands to own the label of affordable luxury:

“The high street is really divided according to brand value,” says [Masoud Golsorkhi, the editor of Tank, a London magazine about culture and fashion], who is also a consultant for fashion brands. “Prada wants to be next to Gucci, Gucci wants to be next to Prada. The retail strategy for luxury brands is to try to keep as far away from the likes of Zara. Zara’s strategy is to get as close to them as possible.”…

Zara stores cozy up to the most famous brands in the world to sing their luxury ambitions even as they profit off a brilliant, cheap, short supply chain that delivers similar fashion at a much lower price.

In this case, proximity matters. By being located near prestigious brands, Zara is pulled up more to their level. Additionally, shoppers willing to wander into the really high-status stores might then also wander into Zara. This seems to be the strategy of the shopping mall as well: utilize several important anchor stores (or anchor facilities/restaurants in “lifestyle centers“) to help bring in more customers who will then also visit other stores along the way.

I wonder: are there any streets or malls where retailers have found ways to expressly disallow stores like Zara? Imagine a high-end outlet mall where there are only high-end retailers and no middle-brow stores or aspiring stores are allowed. Leasing prices is one way to do this but this article makes it sound like firms like Zara can do an end run by paying those big sums and then not spend money on traditional marketing.

Is James Bond’s social status diminished by product placement?

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Product placement is rampant in Hollywood films and here is a look at what products James Bond is now selling:

Never mind the other products basking in the superspy’s aura, such as Sony mobile phones and Vaio laptop computers, Macallan single-malt Scotch, Honda cycles, Bollinger Champagne, Globe-Trotter suitcases, Crockett & Jones footwear, Walther guns, Aston Martin cars, Swarovski jewelry, Omega watches, OPI nail polish, Land Rovers and Range Rovers and all the rest.Some pay for the privilege, some make other arrangements. Some, like the new James Bond fragrance hawked by Procter & Gamble, aren’t in the film. But all told, sponsorship and other ancillary deals for “Skyfall” are said to have brought in $45 million, about a third of what it cost to produce the film, one of the best in the Bond series…

Today’s sophisticated media consumer expects to see brands in TV shows, movies and even video games, according to Tom Weeks, senior vice president at LiquidThread (formerly known as Starcom Entertainment), the branded entertainment and content development operation within Chicago’s Starcom MediaVest Group. But proper context — proper casting — is a must…

Caterpillar, which first tied up with 007 in 1999’s “The World is Not Enough,” hopes the “Skyfall” connection boosts brand awareness, particularly in emerging markets like China, which seems a manageable goal.

Perhaps this kind of brand integration is inevitable: brands are always looking for subtle and not-so-subtle ways to associate their products with being “cool.” And what could be better than Bond, an international spy who doesn’t have stuff at home but instead uses all sorts of gadgets all around the world?

But, I’m reminded of Naomi Klein’s arguments in No Logo about the increasing branding of our world. If Bond is so cool, why does he need to be so connected to brands? Isn’t Bond, like the rock ‘n’ roll stars of the 1960s who built their initial popularity on rebelling and not selling out, just selling out? If Bond has to shill for products, what hope is there for the rest of society? Something doesn’t connect here: Bond’s status is tied to the idea that he isn’t beholden to the trappings of life that hold back average people yet the newer movies are now suggesting he too is just another part of the capitalistic world. Thus, Bond is just another commodity who needs other commodities to be successful. His status is now less dependent on his character or his unique actions, but, like other commodities, is tied to the fate of other commodities.

Quick Review: The Casual Vacancy and Back to Blood

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I recently read two recently-published New York Times best sellers: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling and Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe. Even though the books come from very different authors, one known for writing about a boy wizard and the other known for “new journalism” and tackling status, I thought the books had a lot in common. After a quick overview of each story, I discuss some of the similarities:

1. The Casual Vacancy is about English small-town life as the village of Pagford debates whether a nearby council estate (public housing project in American terms) should remain under their purview or should come under control of the nearby large city. The sudden death of a local council member alters the debate and different members of the community, from residents of the council estate, disaffected teenagers, and local business owners get involved in the decision. In the end, the battle doesn’t really turn out well for anyone involved.

2. Back to Blood is about multicultural Miami where different ethnic and social groups vie for control. The main story is about a Russian businessman turned art benefactor who is investigated by a beleaguered Cuban cop and WASP reporter. Others are caught up in this story including the black police chief, the Cuban mayor, a Cuban psychiatric nurse, and a pornography addiction psychiatrist. Similarly, no one really wins in the end.

3. Although set in very different places, the muted English countryside versus vibrant Miami (reflected to some degree by the writing styles, more conventional for Rowling, more in-your-face from Wolfe), there are common themes.

3a. Power and status. At the heart of these novels are characters vying for control. Of course, this looks different in different places: in Pagford, England, this means being a local council member or having a respectable job in the local community (say as a bakery owner or a doctor) while in Miami, this means the ability to own expensive clothes, cars, houses, and boats while also twisting people’s arms in the directions you want them to go. The characters in both books spend a lot of time worrying about their relative position and scheming about how to get to the top of the heap or how not to be buried completely by others (there is little room for middle ground).

3b. Sex. This is tied to power and status, but both books feature a lot of sexual activity. On one hand, it is presented as one of the rare moments when the characters aren’t solely consumed by the quest for power and yet, on the other hand, sex and who is having sex with whom and for what reason, is inevitably wrapped up in the naked grab for power and status.

3c. Characters alienated from society. Both books are full of characters who feel like they don’t fit in society, that they don’t know where they belong or aren’t able to achieve what they would really want to achieve. This comes across in some classic types: there are teenagers who feel like the adults around them are idiots and so they grasp at ways to make their own name. There are characters caught in the cogs of bureaucracy, particularly adults who are “successful” but don’t feel like it, who have some agency but are ultimately dependent on social and government institutions.

3d. Communities striving for goals but having difficulty overcoming the frailty of their human actors. Although the communities are quite different in size and aspirations (Miami striving to be a world-class city and Pagford striving to control more of its own destiny), their characters want them to be known and coherent places. They want their neighborhoods as well as their municipalities to be about something. Alas, both places are reliant on social actors that can’t overcome their own anxieties and hang-ups and this limits what the larger whole can become.

In the end, I’m tempted to write these off as the sort of themes one finds all the time in “serious adult literature,” the sort of books that peel back the facade of life and expose people for the vain creatures that they are. These are not uncommon themes in more modern books where there are no real heroes, most characters are just trying to get by, and authors revel in tackling sociological issues. But, I don’t think it is an accident that the two books cover similar ground. Power, sex, alienation, and communities striving for success are known issues in our 21st century world. Compared to movies, books like these offer more space to develop these themes and really expose the depths to which individuals and institutions have fallen. Stories like these can translate sociological themes into a medium that the public understands.

Yet, I can’t help but wish that both books had more redemptive endings. If power, sex, alienation, and community striving do make the world go round, how can this be tackled in a “right” way? Is there anyone or any social institution who can put us on the right path? In ways common to 21st century commentary, both of these books offer a bleak view of social life and not much hope for the future.

Tom Wolfe and Max Weber’s ideas about status

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In the wake of the release of his new book Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe talks about his “sociological approach to writing”:

On his sociological approach to writing

“This attention to status … started when I was in graduate school and I was in a program called American Studies, which was a mixture of different disciplines but one [in which] you were forced to take sociology. I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline that didn’t have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, ‘Hey, here’s the key. Here’s the key to understanding life and all its forms.’ And the great theorist or status theorist was a German named Max Weber. And from that time on, I said this obviously is the way to analyze people in all of their manifestations. I mean, my theory is that every moment — even when you’re by yourself in the bathroom, you are trying to live up to certain status requirements as if someone were watching … It’s only when your life is in danger that you drop all that.”

If you have read any of Wolfe’s novels, you know his characters are constantly worried about status: what do people think of me? In The Bonfire of the Vanities , Sherman McCoy starts at the top of the world as a bond trader but the story traces his path to the bottom as he loses his job, his family, and, most importantly, his previous status as “Master of the Universe.” On the other side, the title character in I Am Charlotte Simmons comes from a more humble background and has to learn how to negotiate within an elite university.

Weber built upon Marx’s ideas about the means and modes of production by adding the dimension of status. Marx argues social class was determined by economic factors; you either had access to and control of economic resources or not. But Weber suggested status, or prestige, was also tied up with economic resources. Thus, one might be high status but relatively lower on the economic ladder or vice versa. An example of this in today’s society would be a measure of occupational prestige where Americans are asked to rate different occupations on a prestige scale from 1-100. Here is one such table from Harris Interactive in 2009:

Firefighters don’t make the most money nor do nurses but both are considered more prestigious, probably because they involve caring for people. In contrast, look at the bottom of the list: occupations where the actors may be perceived as looking more for money or their own interests are considered less prestigious.

If you want to read more on the connection between Tom Wolfe, sociology, and the concept of status, Joel Best wrote an interesting 2001 piece titled “‘Status! Yes!’: Tom Wolfe as a Sociological Thinker. I also wonder if there isn’t a hint of Goffman in Wolfe’s work as well. What he describes above also could play out through the concept of impression management and the constant need to change our behavior to fit the changing social situations.

 

The first laptop met with distaste because it was associated with the gendered job of secretary

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The “first recognizable laptop” created in 1982 ran into some problems such as its hefty price tag and its association with typing and who did the typing in many offices:

But Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm and Handspring (makers of the Treo), was there in 1982 and he told a different story at the Computer History Museum a few years ago during a panel on the laptop. For him, the problems were not exclusively in the harder domains of currency and form factor. No, sociological and psychological reasons made the GRiD Compass hard to sell to businessmen…

This is an amazing fact. We had this product. It was designed for business executives. And the biggest obstacle, one of the biggest obstacles, we had for selling the product was the fact — believe it or not — that it had a keyboard. I was in sales and marketing. I saw this first-hand. At that time, 1982, business people, who were in their 40s and 50s, did not have any computer or keyboard in their offices. And it was associated with being part of the secretarial pool or the word processing (remember that industry?) department. And so you’d put this thing in their office and they’d say, “Get that out of here.” It was like getting a demotion. They really were uncomfortable with it…

The second reason they were uncomfortable with it is that none of them knew how to type. And it wasn’t like they said, “Oh, I’ll have to learn how to type.” They were very afraid — I saw this first-hand — they were very afraid of appearing inept. Like, “You give me this thing, and I’m gonna push the wrong keys. I’m gonna fail.”

In Hawkins telling at least, there was no way around these obstacles. “We couldn’t solve this problem. It took a generational change, for the next younger group who had been exposed to terminals and computers to grow up,” he continued. “That was an amazing technology adoption problem you would have never thought about.”

This is a great example of underlying sociological issues that might not be considered fully when making and marketing a new product. On one hand, this was an exciting new technology but on the other hand, existing social factors made it difficult for businessmen to grab the opportunity this technology represented. Ideas about gender and who was supposed to be a typist, viewed as a lower status position, influenced technology adaptation.

Also, this story could lead into the history of secretaries and typists. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the field of secretaries started turning away from men to women. Like other gendered occupations with a majority of women, secretary became a lower status position with relatively lower pay.

Keeping your lawn nice under pressure from your neighbors

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A Canadian journalist explores why he recently started pulling dandelions out of his lawn:

Well, according to University of Toronto sociologist Brent Berry, I’ve likely knuckled under to the social pressures that come with people living in proximity on modern North American urban landscapes.

“It’s all part of human nature,” says Berry, an American-born associate professor whose research focuses on urban sociology, among other things. “People strive to live in homogeneous communities where they and their neighbours conform to certain standards. Toeing the line is a social control thing (and) it’s fascinating how that manifests itself in regards to confronting nature.”

In other words, I’ve become weed-whipped.

Not that that’s a bad thing, according to Berry.

Lawns, he says, are in some ways public expressions or extensions of who we are as individuals. Messy people are more likely to have a messy yard, while fastidious individuals – especially those who are retired and have both the time and money needed to create and maintain a weed-free lawn – are likely to have, well, you know.

“Every human being likes to have control over their environment,” says Berry. “Lawns are like personal grooming.”

I’ve heard arguments about the status lawns can convey but I’ve never heard it compared to personal grooming…

Another note: it isn’t just the social pressure of neighbors. This social pressure has been enshrined in local ordinances where people can’t have grass above a certain height (say 6 inches) or can’t have certain plants or weeds. Your neighbors may not like your lawn and impose negative sanctions on you (you don’t want to be the one with the lawn full of dandelions) but an increasing number of municipalities will simply come mow your lawn and bill you for it.

Tying purchases of larger fast food items to McMansions and status seeking

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A forthcoming study from researchers from Paris and Northwestern University shows that powerless people make larger fast food purchases in order to show their status:

Consumers who feel powerless reach for extra-large portions of food in an effort to increase their social standing in the eyes of others, a new study suggests.

“An ongoing trend in food consumption is consumers’ tendency to eat more and more,” the researchers wrote in the study to be published in the April 2012 print edition of the Journal of Consumer Research. “The increase in food consumption is particularly prevalent among vulnerable populations, such as lower socioeconomic status consumers.”…

The study authors noted that cultural norms associate some larger items, such as houses, vehicles or flatscreen TVs, with wealth, success and high social status. If consumers feel unhappy with their status, they may take this belief and apply it to food, the researchers suggested.

These consumers may attempt to compensate for their perceived lower status by showing others that they can afford to buy the larger sizes, but instead of a Mcmansion they buy larger portion sizes, according to the researchers. In one of the experiments, the participants perceived that consumers who bought a large coffee at a cafe had a higher status than those who chose medium or small — even when the price of all sizes was the same.

It seems that the key here is that these are the decisions made by powerless people, people who have limited, more legitimate ways to show off their status. So do the authors suggest that people with more power don’t buy items to simply show status? This is an argument typically made about McMansions and SUVs: certain people with money feel the need to show off their wealth with these more ostentatious, larger purchases. On the other hand, the implication is that people with more education or taste would consume other sorts of items, not seeking status. Really? A designer larger, green home isn’t also somewhat about status? Going smaller is necessarily less about status?

I would love to see results of similar experiments done with different groups regarding some of the other consumer items mentioned in this report. I suspect we might find that status seeking purchases look different across different socioeconomic statuses, echoing Bourdieu’s distinctions between those who little capital (in this fast food study) versus more capital and also between those with more education and more money.