Social Media and other Status Games

Is social media so different? Some general thoughts about status games

Freya India writes,

apps explicitly encourage us to compare and compete, to see ourselves as the main character, to see other people like products. “Ever wonder why your friends’ selfies looks so good?” asks the editing app Facetune, encouraging us to download. “Say goodbye to superficial connections,” says a dating app called Hot Or Not. Snapchat even recently introduced a new “Solar System” feature which publicly ranks your friends in order of how close you are to them (of course your avatar is literally sitting on the centre of the world, with friends orbiting around it). Snapchat lies to children that everyone cares about their Story, Instagram pretends their faces and bodies are of paramount importance, and we wonder why Gen Z grow up to be self-absorbed and entitled and constantly think their existence is invalidated by the real world.

And yet, one could argue that people always have seen themselves as the main character of the story, and they have always compared themselves to others.

I worry that there’s never been such constant cultural messaging. There’s never been so much nudging. There’s never been more incentives.

I just want to point out that social media is not the only unhealthy game in town. Status games have been around for a long time, and their effect on organizational dynamics is a subject that I find very interesting. I have touched on these issues before, and I will have more to say about them in an essay I am working on. Meanwhile, here are a few thoughts.

Academia

If you think about it, academia works a lot like social media. Everyone’s status ranking is very clear. The competition does not stop when someone gets tenure. Full professors compare publication records and get jealous of their colleagues’ offices or lower teaching loads. Everyone is obsessed with their reputation. Try to get a paper past a referee if you have not cited the referee’s own work.

In the STEM fields, the status game is tempered, but not completely suppressed, by the confrontation with physical reality. If a consensus forms around a theory that turns out to be wrong, the dissidents can eventually prove their point.

The Federal Reserve Board

For a status ranking system run amok, you might peruse the Official Staff Page of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The titles listed include: Director, Deputy Director, Senior Associate Director, Associate Director, Deputy Associate Director, Assistant Director, Senior Adviser, and Adviser.

And those are within a single division! Similar titles exist in other divisions. And there is a hierarchy further down. You have senior economists, economists, research assistants, and others.

Most of these titles are not needed to clarify duties or reporting lines. They serve almost purely as status markers.

The more titles an organization has, the more it will select for people who really care about titles.

What type of culture do you think this produces? Do people tell the truth to higher-ups, or do they tell them what they want to hear? Does it attract people who are bold and imaginative or people who recognize consensus and fall in line behind it?

I am not saying that a suck-up culture is the wrong culture for the Fed. The central bank’s job is to promote stability, and that is not an agency where we should want to see a culture of wild experimentation. If anything, maybe we would be better off if the Fed were even stuffier.

The Military

Traditional ranks in the military serve a purpose. Clear lines of authority and routine obedience are necessary in a fighting force. But the military is still subject to the problem of selecting for people who care about titles.

Analysts have observed that the culture of the military tends to decay in peacetime. In peacetime, you get ahead by pleasing the people above you. You become a general by playing the game of organizational politics more shrewdly than the other guys. The peacetime culture tends toward a suck-up culture.

But in wartime, boldness and imagination are required. In wartime, a high rank brings with it serious responsibility. When a nation is involved in war, its leaders must identify and promote the men who are oriented toward winning a war, not the men who are focused on winning and preserving their status within the organization.

Status Worries and Human Nature

It is easy to see the irrationality in our concerns with status. I recall reading that a survey of sociologists found that a majority thought that their work was so important that it would be remembered many years after their death. And yet that same survey showed that most could not remember the names of the most recent Presidents of the American Sociological Association.

But irrational or not, it is part of human nature. Can it be unhealthy to worry about your reputation on Instagram or Twitter but perfectly healthy to care about getting promoted from Deputy Associate Director to Associate Director in a division at the Fed?

It’s easy to argue that humans, like other primates, have status hierarchies. But for our ancestors, were status worries so central?

Think of a family farm in 1850. Their big worry has to be whether the crop comes in.

Think of a steel worker in 1950. He plays his status game in the bowling alley; at work, all he cares about is his paycheck.

It seems fair to say that more people have more status worries today. Possible reasons:

1. social media

2. loss of attachment to extended families, neighborhoods, and churches, making people looking for reassurance that they belong

3. satisfaction of basic wants. Moving up the hierarchy of needs, people focus on status.

4. other?

I think that (2) is a lot of it. But we should be careful about singing the virtues of having a secure place in society. I’ll take the insecurity of a dynamic, mobile society over the certainty of knowing your place in a caste system.

I think it is easy to condemn the status game that someone else plays while getting wrapped up in a different status game yourself. I am inclined to share Freya India’s disdain for the way status games play out in social media. But I don’t think we know enough about status games in general to be confident that social media is the disaster that she and others portray.

To offer personal advice, I come back to my belief that grandparents are the winners of the game of life. I would say that you should try to keep that in mind and not get too wrapped up in any particular status game, whether on social media or elsewhere, if it is going to take you off course.

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