Sunday, June 21, 2009
Conspicuous Blogging
An interesting article about changes in the ways people are signalling status - a switch from conspicuous consumption of material goods to online signalling through the number of Facebook friends say. I'm not sure quite how important this is as a trend in quantitative terms but there is certainly something in it. It fits in with similar news from Japan. Of course those of us in academia have long signalled our status through publication, citation, winning research grants etc. and the same has been true of other professions such as art or music. Conspicuous production rather than consumption. The paradox is I'd love to tell you right now about an article I wrote where I referred to this issue 12 years ago. But I can't without revealing my identity. An anonymous blog is very unconspicuous production in it's nature. Maybe I should go down the road of other non-anonymous academic bloggers :)
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2 comments:
It does get a little hard to stay anonymous when your online and offline personas intersect, isn't it? :)
Just wondering whether to abandon this blog and do a non-anonymous one. Up till this point I haven't thought it would help careerwise as I don't have enough opinions about policy related stuff that people would want to read.
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