echo chambers and kindle

How Kindle is killing snobbery

"There's a wonderful chapter on the rise and fall of the video phone, which creates an incredible social pressure for people to appear attractive onscreen, which sets off a kind of arms race -- purchasing masks and bodysuits to wear on the phone, and so forth." --

I've never understood social complexities of status. The fact that I am a snob of some sort does not mean I must be conspicuous about my semi-strange or out-dated consumer tastes. It mostly means I'll have nothing to say to people who talk only about things I find beneath my interest. Based on my understanding of a social network or a social context of status, it seems more important to have broad interest and thus be capable of interacting with a wide selection of people than to be an apparent expert in one or two things.

Since I'm anti-social generally, I don't care to interact with a wide selection of people and by extension don't place much importance on my status in the broader competitive nature of things. I tend more to care about specific status interactions rather than some general or popular conception of my "status". Things that are influenced by competency or expertise, even of a broad nature (since I'm a quasi-generalist academically speaking, dabbling in whatever interests me that week).

And quite frankly, I'm in agreement that the Internet gives more of a reinforcing nature of snobbery anyway in the format of all the sharing of information it enables. It means instead of conspicuously draping before the commoners that you have the vestiges of an education or class status, you are draping it before your peers in a competitive reinforcement of your intra-group interests.