 I'm pleased to have Alice Marwick join us today to talk about status update celebrity publicity and self-branding in web 2.0 She's a postdoc with Dana Boyd at Microsoft Research, and she's also a research affiliate here at Birkman. Welcome. Thanks. Thanks for the introduction and thanks so much for everybody for giving up your lunch hour here It's great to see so many people So this the what I'm going to talk about today is a book that I'm currently working on that comes out of my dissertation research So I'm very much looking forward to getting some feedback and great questions and discussions so I can flesh out some of the themes I'm going to be giving a pretty broad overview of what's a pretty in-depth Project, but I can certainly drill down into anything in the Q&A if people are interested. So Just to start out with sort of the obvious This project involves web 2.0, which I'm sure everyone in the room is familiar with this buzzword Generally seen as the second generation of web applications Which makes it easy for people to create communicate collaborate and share online content But I'm really interested in this as a sort of as a discourse or an ideology or a buzzword rather than you know A particular technology. I think that web 2.0 is a value system that comes out of the end of the dot-com bust and emerges into the new millennium in Northern, California, which is where I sort of situate this project So the data for this talk was gathered during my dissertation field work which took place from 2007 to 2009 in Northern, California Specifically, I was talking with people who were very involved with what they call the tech scene there or the web 2.0 scene So this is a subset of the larger sort of Silicon Valley ecosystem This is people who are very much interested in social technologies people who work at companies like Twitter Facebook and Dig Sort of aspiring entrepreneurs social media gurus people like that and so I Did in-depth interviews with us about 35 people including people like Kevin Rose Cara Swisher Did participant observation for nine months living in Silicon Valley in San Francisco working with these people and collected tweets and other Sort of discursive evidence that I then Coated and analyzed so really this is about looking for patterns in the data collected over a long period of time so What did I find and why did I go to San Francisco in the first place? I was interested in this idea of web 2.0 as a meritocracy as something that's Democratic and egalitarian and what I found was that web 2.0 is not a meritocracy Instead the currency of web 2.0 is very similar to what we see in Hollywood or Wall Street or Capitol Hill namely, it's social status and I think that how social status is Negotiated in the tech scene is quite different from the way that it looks in other communities and partly this is because of the social technologies used by this group So that's what I'm going to talk about today. Why do we care about status online? Why is this an interesting lens to look at social technology? How do people increase their status? What techniques do they use and finally? What are some of the implications? So let's start with why why do we care about social status online? Why does it matter? On March 24th 2010 about a year ago Julia Allison quit the internet So some of you may know who Julia Allison is she's a New York City media personality and Writer and she has this blog called non-society that she calls a lifecast and it's a day-to-day Broadcasting of her everyday life which mostly consists of pictures of herself And she's been blogging since 2006 and her blog has sort of gained her a certain amount of notoriety She was on the cover of wired magazine and she covers New York Fashion Week for NBC But she also has a lot of haters There's a hater blog called reblogging non-society Which is devoted to picking apart every single thing that Julia Allison does people from this blog have called up her boyfriend Called her employer spread all types of things online about how she's stupid and shallow and did see and whatnot So after many years of this she wrote this very dramatic blog post about a year ago saying that she's quitting the internet forever That she's quitting tweeting. She's quitting blogging and quitting online video And mostly this was because of these haters and when I interviewed her She said she felt like an abused woman that she had been through all of this because of her online presence So she left New York for a month. She went on a yoga retreat, but she came back and a month later She was blogging again and as of March 2012. She's blogging every day and now she is dating John McCain's son So it all worked out for her I guess So a lot of the time when we talk about what motivates people to participate in social media The models that we have don't really explain somebody like Julia Allison I want to discuss in this talk what motivates people to engage online through this particular lens of social status And I think that a primary reason that people interact online is For social status or popularity Reputation what other people think of you how much social power you have So in the particular group of people that I was studying these sort of elite web 2.0 crowd High status means that you have a lot of attention and visibility that people are paying attention to what you're doing This means that people create content online that they think other people will look at now I don't think it's inevitable that social technology turned out this way I think it's instead deeply influenced by the tools that we use online and the culture that produced those tools Which is this geeky entrepreneurial and wealthy group of technological elites But let's back up a little bit. So when I say social status, what do I mean? We can think of social status as your social power It's where you would rank on a social hierarchy Faith both on traits that you might be born with such as your gender or your race or traits that you might have Achieved such as where you went to school or the amount of money that you have Now I think social status is very much Contextual this means that your social status is different based on the particular group of people that you're interacting with so every social group whether it's a company or a group of friends or a You know a PTA meeting is going to have a social hierarchy But what constitutes high or low status is also contextual So think of a group of Star Trek fans for example in Star Trek fandom having a great deal of knowledge about Star Trek would probably be a High status thing if you are in a trendy singles bar on a Friday night having a great deal of knowledge about Star Trek It's probably not as high status So although we can think of certain things as having high status across groups So education and wealth tend to be generally valued by lots of different groups of people the specifics of status reveals The values of a community it reveals what type of behavior is rewarded and encouraged So for example a social context that rewards looks or the values looks versus one that values Education is going to encourage different behavior in the members of that social group So in this particular social group, what does status look like online today now in this group of web 2.0? Elite virtually everyone produced content whether that was a blog or a Twitter feed or a flick or stream or whatnot The larger audience that they could get for that online content the more attention and visibility They got and the more influence they had and this is Twitter holics This is the top hundred Twitter Twitter users based on followers and we're gonna come back to this in a minute But what does this look like? What does status look like online and how is it displayed now? The first thing is that there's no current mechanism to track identity across sites, you know We've heard a lot about identity 2.0 But right now nothing like that actually exists But status does tend to be persistent So people tend to use people in this particular kind of elite technological new you Ten you tend to be able to find them across different sites So for example, this is Aubrey Sabala She's a marketing manager at Facebook and you can see this is her about me page where she has links to her Facebook her LinkedIn her Foursquare her Twitter and her Tumblr So the audience will follow these high status people from from site to site Second status exists within an ecosystem of technology So someone who's a huge star on YouTube will probably also get a lot of email They'll probably have a lot of Twitter followers and have a lot of Facebook friends Now how do people compare status so in many communities status is kind of ineffable It's ephemeral. It's hard to describe. So how would you describe who's smarter or who is better looking? There's no way to kind of put a you know a definitive quantifiable number on that But in San Francisco in this text scene, it's right with engineers and the basis for comparison tends to be numbers or metrics So metrics is a business term or an engineering term that refers to any type of measurement That's used to gauge some quantifiable component of a company's performance. So something that can be measured is a metric If status can be quantified and measured then it can easily be compared. So for example How much is your company valued? What's your net worth or how many Twitter followers do you have? So this is Veronica Belmont. She's one of my informants She's a video blogger and you can see that at the point where I took the screenshot She had about 1.5 million Twitter followers. Now this this is something that can be compared She can be compared against people who have less Twitter followers and more Twitter followers the importance of these metrics and the extent to which people compare them is it's sort of hard to underestimate I Interviewed a number of people who worked for valley wag which is a Gawker media site that was sort of a Silicon Valley tech gossip rag and they said that in the grand scheme of things the number one story They always wanted to cover was about money. They didn't want to see a sex scandal They wanted money because money people could understand and they could compare they could say I have more money or less money than that particular person Now at the time that I was doing this fieldwork We're coming back to Twitter holic again the primary technology used to demonstrate status was Twitter and Twitter followers were the primary metric So people knew exactly how many Twitter followers they had they knew how many Twitter followers their friends had and they they They and they compared these numbers all the time and this wasn't seen as an unusual thing This was seen as very widespread So the number of Twitter followers then became a metric for the influence or reputation you had in this particular social scene Now I call this idea of Twitter followers as one example of what I think of as status affordances and Status affordances are software features that have explicitly been created for status display So I have a couple of examples on the slide in the bottom left We see the Yelp elite appellation, which if you if you contribute a certain amount of content to Yelp You become Yelp elite and then whenever you interact with other people on the site You have this like elite tag appended to your name on the top left We have Gawkers commenting system where their most valued commenters get a star and their comments are pushed up in the ranking on The right we have four squares leaderboard This is sort of an older older version of their app But you can see that it specifically ranks people in terms of the points that they're getting on four score and at the bottom We have sort of the classic example of the the ebay ebay feedback score now Nowadays you'll see that almost every online community has some sort of status affordance So the larger point here is that social media tools are prescriptive they encourage a Particular social behaviors and they provide clear rewards for behaving in the right way So in other words certain assumptions about social life are built into the software through these status affordances So they reward things like attracting followers adding friends being witty answering a great deal of questions And they encourage users to present themselves and interact with others in ways for which they will be rewarded So here's a great example This is a brand-new four square three point oh application and you can see on the left that this person has checked into Gukaku and they've gotten a certain number of points. They got one point for returning to New York They got one point for going to a Korean restaurant And they got four points for hanging out with a friend of theirs that they hadn't seen in a while So from this we can see that the type of behavior that for school reward is going out a lot with lots of friends To lots of different places in urban environments If your idea of a good time is sitting at home watching Netflix with your partner Which it is kind of mine You're not going to be rewarded for that type of behavior on on four square So four square prescribes a particular ideal of social behavior Now what does status get you? Why would people try so hard to get this type of high status now in communities with heavy social media use what we found Is that online status bleeds into offline status and vice versa? It's very hard to draw these clear bright bright lines between how you're treated online and how you're treated offline So you get real-world rewards now one of these may just be the general benefits of connecting with people online Empathy connection to others and intimacy Perhaps you value attention and visibility for your own sake you like to be validated You get recognition and respect from others But in this particular scene of web 2.0 folks we see people getting magazine covers Speaking at conferences getting funding for their startups getting clients and press coverage So it's no wonder that people are motivated by status when the type of rewards They get are so tangible and it's baked into many of the technologies that they use, but it also has its downsides Which brings me to the second part of my talk, which is how how do people increase their online status? And how do you make people pay attention now? You can use one of these three techniques which I talk about in my book microcelebrity life Streaming and self-branding and I'm going to talk about each one of these in turn But it's important to note that these they sort of overlap They're not a hundred percent discreet a lot of the time you'll see people engaging in multiple of these strategies But every single one of them is deeply influenced by advertising marketing and consumer culture And the goal of each one is to increase the person practicing it Increase their attention and visibility Let's start with microcelebrity So microcelebrity is a way of boosting your online status and visibility And it's this idea of celebrity as something you do rather than something you are So we used to think of celebrity as somebody who is famous But now we can think of celebrity as something that you can do even if only 25 people are listening And so this involves creating a persona using social media And thinking about everybody who is watching that persona whether it's your facebook friends or your twitter followers or your blog readers As an audience so you're not thinking i'm putting up this blog post so my mom can read it You're like this is going out to my blog readers to my audience and you sort of think of them as a group of fans So it's really a mindset You also would People practicing microcelebrity will share personal information with their followers to seem authentic and real And they'll also tend to be more accessible than our traditional concept of celebrity So they'll actually answer emails or you know chat with their followers Etc Now we see this type of microcelebrity being practiced by many different types of people On the left we have michael errington who's a tech blogger who runs the tech crunch network Which was recently purchased by aol for i think 50 million dollars something like that and on the right we have audrey kitching who is a scene queen She mostly blogs on buzz net her audience is mostly teenage girls And but both of these people they don't look like they have very much in common But what they do have in common is that they both use social media and this type of microcelebrity strategy to increase their attention to visibility So let's look at some of the roots of this Now scholars have identified this process of celebration Which is the idea that celebrities have become more important to our culture than ever before And this has affected virtually every area of popular culture. We now have celebrity chefs celebrity politicians celebrity journalists Now it's true that we've historically emulated celebrities since the birth of mass media, you know clara bows lipstick Jennifer annison's haircut Celebrities have functioned as role models for how to live in the modern age But now we see the inner workings of fame in a much more visible way There's television shows that show you how people become models or how people become fashion designers There's gossip blogs that sort of show, you know the day-to-day life of living as a celebrity And because people understand much more about how things like publicity photo opportunities paparazzi casting Agents etc how they work than they did 50 years ago people can now adopt these techniques and apply it to themselves Now the traditional relationship between celebrities and fans is one of distance It's sort of this classic broadcast Model of mass media where you have someone like elvis presley whose images broadcast to a lot of fans And the fans can really only consume the image of the celebrity in these sort of very specific ways You know, they can join a fan club. They can write him a fan letter. They can try and get his autograph But fans really want intimacy and we We see that fans want attention. They want acknowledgement from the people that they admire The actions like going to concerts or gossiping about celebrities make people may increase this feeling of closeness with others And the term for thinking that you know a celebrity is parasocial interaction in the media studies literature And what that means is that when you interact with a celebrity, it almost feels in some way like a social interaction So there's a study saying that Heavy television watchers would have the same psychological effects From watching the television show friends as they would with hanging out with a group of real friends for 30 minutes Now the difference in the network to age is this is parasocial interaction becomes social So here's Veronica again She says she's really lucky with her fans because there's a feeling of a conversation She responds to everybody who writes to her She wants to keep the line of communication open because once you lose that you seize to be relatable And you lose that ability to converse with your audience You're on a pedestal and it's not as fun and it's not as watchable So here we have more of a many to many model of celebrity where you can communicate with micro celebrities Using social media and micro celebrities use social media very strategically to seem very accessible It's this idea that they seem more authentic than a traditional celebrity that they're less removed from the audience And they share more personal things about themselves because they have access to all these social media technologies which allow them to do so But a lot of these relationships these fan celebrity dynamics look very similar from the outside This is a photo I took at south by southwest interactive in 2008 It's a group of kids who had driven 14 hours to see kevin rose Speak with his show dig nation and dig is an online news sharing site And kevin is the CEO or he was at the time And so the girl in the center has this homemade shirt that said I heart kevin and these guys behind her had made these dig shirts Um, and this looks very much like, you know, any fans of a celebrity anywhere So people can feel very very passionately about these people who practice micro celebrity It's not as removed as we might think from the traditional dynamics There is a quote from an informant who is saying he's strategically trying to gain his audience Which is one of these sort of characteristics of micro celebrity He says there's a reason I can post 150 times a day and have 2 000 followers I spent a year and a half changing the way I tweet on a monthly basis to find an algorithm of success So he strategically designed his content to be consumed by an audience and to try to increase his audience Here's julia again. Um, and here's an example of her performing intimacy. She's telling her Twitter readers that she ate four chocolate bars and now she feels ill So it's these types of little personal tidbits of information That is one of the characteristics of micro celebrity that helps people reach out to an audience and feel connected to them But then like a real celebrity people who practice This have to be careful what they're doing to maintain their public image. Um, and here's another one of my informants Tara hunt, she says being a public figure is different I have to be a little bit more careful about who I date and how I date and all that type of stuff And she was very conscious of how she was perceived in public Who was taking pictures of her who was writing about her or that type of thing And we see this very similar type of self monitoring and the next two self presentation strategies that i'm going to talk about So the next strategy that people use to increase their online attention and visibility is self branding And unlike micro celebrity self branding is very much oriented in the business literature Many of you have probably been exposed to this literature Here's some of the books the bestsellers around how to become a personal brand And so this idea that you think of yourself as something to be marketed and sold that you build a very strategic brand around yourself Like, you know, i'm a thought leader or i'm a you know, i'm a Retail guru or whatnot And you use social media to disseminate content about your area of expertise in a very work friendly way With the idea that the people watching are potential clients or potential business owners There's also this expectation that your life and your work are very blurred that they're basically part of the same thing That your identity is very much dependent on your work So this idea of self branding comes from this article in fast company in 1997 the brand called you Fast company many of you will remember as the sort of tech boom magazine And tom peters wrote the good news is that everyone has the chance to stand out Everyone can learn improve and build upon their skills Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark So this is very much rhetoric from the sort of dot-com era where we see the rise of social media That people can start using internet the internet to disseminate content about themselves to a very wide audience That they weren't able to do before the internet The rhetoric in this particular piece is that everyone can succeed using these techniques if you just put enough time in So the idea of meritocracy but also that everybody would want to that This is something that would be sort of universally desired by people reading this piece And here's another one of my informants taunt excelec and he says you're putting yourself on the same footing as a company Companies have URLs. I have my own URL. I don't need facebook. I have my own domain So he sees himself as a brand similar to a company online And he definitely sees this as good and valued that he can compete in the online marketplace And on the same footing as a traditional brand would be able to do Now here's a here's a a slide. I pulled off the web So here's what you're supposed to do to become a thought leader in your field Do all these particular things these particular types of actions from writing a book to attending events Putting out newsletters writing articles case studies and white papers. This is a great deal of work This is labor. This doesn't look that different from traditional work And it's a it's a it's a constant hustle So people like gary vaner chuck who's a web 2.0 celebrity Who is a motivational speaker and he had this best-selling book called cashing crush it cash in on your passion He advocates if you're serious about building your personal brand There'll be no time for we or scrabble or book club You can eat and you can hang out with your spouse and your kids But otherwise you're in front of your computer until 3 am every night If you've already worked all day, you might be able to knock it off at midnight. This is all consuming So this is what's being advocated to people as a way to build their online brands Now in reality, um, here's another informant of mine derrick over b He was he was sort of working on this He was spending a great deal of time on twitter trying to build his personal brand and he said my wife came out and said What are you doing? You're losing a connection with me and our kids. He said that was eye opening It was like having to go to social media rehab He was trying to establish himself, but he toned it down a lot So now he's only on the computer until nine or ten o'clock every night He has to have a real life too So this is very very difficult to practice successfully. It takes a great deal of work It also needs you also need to make sure that the brand that you are projecting is corporate friendly at all times So some of you may have heard this anecdote before. This is a marketing guy His twitter handle is key influencer and he was hired by fedex to come in and give a seminar And on his way into memphis, which is where fedex is headquartered He tweeted true confession, but i'm in one of those towns where i scratch my head and say I would die if i had to live here Fedex saw this tweet They were they did not appreciate his characterization of the town that they were headquartered in and they fired him So the idea here is that you have to be very very careful about what you're putting on Online because if somebody sees and it doesn't match up with your business image, you know, it's not going to go well for you So in other words, again, you're always monitoring what you're doing online Um, and this is my glen de bautista. He's a business analyst He said you constantly have to police other people police your friends nag them to take photos down. It's exhausting So it's not even only about monitoring the content you put up online But also putting monitoring the content that your personal social graph is putting up online and how it reflects on you All right now my final strategy i want to go through is life streaming And life streaming is this idea that you use social media to disseminate a constant ongoing stream of information about yourself All of your digital traces that are being created are being put put out there to the public And people use this to create a constant interest in what they're doing and also to develop and maintain connections to other people So the most common tool for doing this is of course twitter Here is the life stream of tarah brown from february 2009 where her first tweet is this is what i'm going to do for today We're going to look for a house We're going to eat at doomies and go to jumbos and then we're going to go see coraline In 3d so then the rest of her tweets are i8. We got an apartment. We went to doomies. It was great We went to Coraline it was great the movie was great So she's going through every single thing that she does about her day and giving her sort of opinion on it to the people Who are following her twitter network More extreme we see somebody like buster benson who's the founder of 750 words and health month And this is a small segment of his personal home page Where he aggregates all the digital information that he's put out into the world through web 2.0 tools So this is the collection of his four square check-ins his tweets his uh Flickr his delicious posts and he creates all these sort of charts and graphs from what he's put out there in the world And this sort of really shows the idea that social media is an ecosystem of technologies that people use these multiple technologies together And it's this data when combined all together that we call the life stream And he is voluntarily releasing and aggregating this own information Now this can be really positive for many people These ongoing pieces of information can create what we call an ambience intimacy or digital awareness A feeling of connection a feeling that people are there That you're connected to them through them sharing these little pieces of their life with you You can get support and empathy and closeness and connection Jeff Jarvis is working on a whole book about the value of publicity because you get this kind of positive feedback And support from people online But again, you really do get used to being watched you look at others and they look at you You put your life stream out there and people Read it and then you read other people's life streams So you have to be careful what what you put out there to make sure that it's going you know It's following the norms of your social group And that it's something that other people will like So why why does status look like this online today? And to figure this out we need to return to San Francisco and look at the people who are building social technologies Most of the web 2.0 technologies that I talked about in this presentation are headquartered in northern california or have a significant presence there And I think that the status structure of the San Francisco tech scene has a very deep influence on the way Many of these social technologies are designed So Tara hunt and informant again gave me this fantastic breakdown of the social structure in the San Francisco tech scene She said on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy of people who are talking about it. They're being very hungry They're being overly eager Then there are those who are working on it. You don't see them as often but they do come out They're pretty focused on their companies and she sees them as the middle class And then the top the upper crust are the people that have done it They had a company people loved they sold it They're now doing whatever the hell they please and then she says the people in the upper upper crust the ones You don't see because they're adobo's and hobnob and labano and that type of thing But what's key in this particular quote is that when she says they did it She's talking about what is the highest status action for someone in the web 2.0 scene Which is creating a technology that people love and selling it and becoming extremely wealthy So this idea of entrepreneurship as the highest status that somebody can engage in and the entrepreneur as this very high status subject position And I want to unpack some of the other assumptions that are enclosed in this paragraph of terrors First there's this idea of egalitarianism that everybody in the san francisco taxine has the chance to succeed That it's open to everybody But it's also a meritocracy So the people who do succeed are the ones who work the hardest or the ones who are the smartest They're the ones who reap the benefits and you see a very interesting correlation of this Which is the people who are very wealthy in the scene are often seen Well the reason that they're wealthy is because they're smarter than everyone else or because they've been really successful Because they worked really hard. So there's a sense that you sort of deserve the wealth that you get The flip side of this of course is that if you don't succeed, it's because you didn't work hard enough or you weren't smart enough There's also this sense of idealism that you can solve social problems through technology Um, entrepreneurialism tends to be very idealistic in a lot of ways We hear a lot of idealistic rhetoric from entrepreneurs around this idea of following your passion Contributing to a community Mentoring others or creating revolutionary products, which will change the world You hear this type of rhetoric in web 2.0 a great deal And entrepreneurialism in general tends to value individualism, you know, the sort of boy genius Wunderkern someone like mark zuckerberg Creativity initiative taking risks Competition and confidence. So these are all traits that are very highly prized in the san francisco scene Now this set of values and beliefs about social media that are shared by people in the tech scene becomes the production culture of social media This is the social context in which web 2.0 technologies are built So I think that these values deeply influence both how products are developed and how people use them There's a lot of assumptions made about people who use web 2.0 products that are in many ways built upon this particular social milieu And I think that web 2.0 tools encourage a type of self presentation which internalizes this entrepreneurial culture and idealizes these virtues And you might say so what? You know that sounds great. Who doesn't like these things anyone recognize this friday? I just thought it'd be funny You might ask, you know, who doesn't like entrepreneurialism and idealism and hardworking creativity? Like why should we be concerned about this? Why would this be seen as a negative thing? But the problem is that status in web 2.0 is not egalitarian It's not meritocratic and it's not based on what is the best or the smartest or the most thoughtful It's based on what people will look at it's based on what content people will consume And the value system of the San Francisco tech scene and the way they use technology is not universal instead It's very very privileged. It requires constant access to technology. It requires an always-on internet connection It generally requires a white-collar job that you're so you're sitting at a desk all day And you have the time to engage in some of these strategies And there's this idea that I think a lot of times when people are building social technology sites They envision the users that looking like themselves and having the same values that they do But we know that this isn't always the case that the way people use technology is very deeply contextual And very deeply influenced by the culture in which they're coming from For example, how does somebody use a tool like color if they're a low or no They're in a low or no tech society. Does it have any value for them? Can they even access content like that on their smartphones? And so these are the type of products that are really being funded and supported In many ways or ones that fit with the values of the web 2.0 scene Now finally Many social technologies. I think require you editing yourself when you go online It requires you being willing to use social technology to to uh Further a lowest common denominator version of yourself. So something that's safe for work. That's non offensive That's not political. That's not opinionated It's this infiltration of corporate ethic and how you think about yourself and how you present that to other people And in your interpersonal relationships And finally, I just wanted to touch very briefly on business models now I think that the three strategies that I've outlined here really show how some of the techniques of marketing and advertising are infiltrating into interpersonal relationships within web 2.0 And the fact that these require thinking of yourself as a product and something to be sold Is not very surprising when you think that the business models of many web 2.0 companies are selling their users personal data So when mark zuckerberg says privacy is disappearing as a social norm and people should be encouraged to share with each other It's not a coincidence that that's the business model of his company um So in conclusion, I think that it's important for us to look at social status as something that deeply motivates online interaction And to think very deeply about whether some of these values of marketing and advertising and celebrity culture And you know and the corporation are things that we want to have integrated into our day-to-day interpersonal relationships with other people online Thank you I'm interested to hear you say a little more about If and how you might distinguish between status and celebrity Because I think there's a There's a different way that status works Say in a room like this versus On the front page of people magazine And I suspect that you have interesting things to say about the face not only interesting things you just said So I'd be curious how you think about that You mean how does status work in a particular context versus this world of celebrity or Well, just in the sense that I think you know, there's a way in which uh celebrities are Weird and interesting and attract a ton of attention in part because the normal rules don't apply to them You know, we watch them in a way That might not be the same I think what you drew attention to is the way that the strategies for sort of Managing you're the image of yourself publicly may apply to celebrities as equally as it applies to non-celebrities in these social media systems, but um, I think there's a way in which uh Status more broadly um encompasses behavior That goes beyond that and I think in the beginning of your talk you tied this to uh You know how it is that You know and at the end of your talk to you tied this to broader social inequality and things like that So I guess I'm just interested in hearing a little more about that connection because to me I thought it was kind of quick I thought you had to move through it quickly in your talks. Yeah, absolutely. Um, that's a great question so You're absolutely right that one of the reasons that celebrities have such a fascination for people is because they're seen as the sort of They're in this sphere where they can do whatever they want and their lives are fantastic Um Everyone in this room might not think that but a lot of people do there's a great book called fame junkies that's written by jake helper and he's a journalist where he went into a Elementary school and asked the kids there about fame and what he found was that 50 of the kids he talked to wanted to be They thought they would be famous when they grew up and for them fame was this idea of a perfect life That once you're a celebrity or once you're famous the rules don't apply to you You can do whatever you want. You can wear whatever clothes you want You can date rich famous beautiful people. You have this kind of fantasy life So I think in many ways celebrity becomes a sort of catchphrase or it stands in for you know These wonderful things that life would have to offer but that's obviously a fantasy. It's it's um, it's a When you actually look at people who experience celebrity, I think the the downsides are quite are quite drastic So you're absolutely right that status goes far beyond You know just being like a good-looking person who's on the cover of us weekly or whatnot I mean, I think and I think the important thing to remember there is that status is extremely Contextual, I mean if you have somebody who is like a traditionally famous celebrity like an actor on a teen television show or something And you put him or her in a room where nobody knows That about her and there she has to sort of Increase her status through other means like in a group where people would set value intellect For example that the fact that that person is on a teen television show isn't going to carry the same type of weight So clearly the the the actions that we reward celebrities for are not the ones that we generally reward People for in the data in their day to day life. What I wanted to put my finger on was the way in which celebrity Tends to manage an audience of fans and reach out to them in a specific way and Dana and I wrote a paper Last summer on celebrity practice on twitter Which is just coming out in convergence in a couple of months Where we looked at how traditionally famous celebrities use twitter and a lot of the techniques that they use are very similar and in there's actually quite a bit of conflict between the traditional entertainment industry and This sort of new culture of celebrity twitter because a lot of the time celebrities will let things leak on twitter that their publicists are horrified by I mean, I think you know, obviously we see celebrity meltdowns on twitter all the time and You go from this model of a very carefully managed very carefully orchestrated celebrity image to one in which You know, it's supposedly more authentic or more real and they're reaching out to their fans in this kind of authentic real way And social media. I think is what creates that kind of difference there that answer the question All right, yeah Thanks so The presentation you give is is very much focused on the individual's actions, but looking at I don't know coming from history of science where there's actor network theory and there's enormous value from that theory of letting others present um, you for yourself And not seeming like you're being self-promoting as as though it were the highest form of playing the game is not Playing the game. Do you see any examples of that where other people promote? People for them. I mean, I'm thinking there was an article about julia sange by who was it? carturian And I just saw an article by tim woo and the chronicle of higher education So these people who are sort of built up by others so they don't even have to do the promotion for themselves Is that still a strategy people try to employ? Is that still a more effective strategy? Is that changed at all with what 2.0? I think that there's a class of people that their achievements sort of Go beyond them having to do that type of self-promotion. So in the dissertation I distinguished between achieved micro celebrity and ascribed micro celebrity And so achieved micro celebrity might be somebody who's doing that type of entrepreneurial self-promotion because they're trying to increase their public Profile whereas ascribed micro celebrity is somebody like steve jobs Who you know, there's actually paparazzi photos of people, you know Taking pictures of him or mark zuckerberg at the you know at the uh walking down the street Yeah walking down the street in paloalto or whatever pumping gas in his car And mark zuckerberg isn't going out there and promoting himself as a celebrity You know, it's his it's his place as an entrepreneur and as the header of facebook that's made him Well known and so people have an interest in him as a result of that But is this a strategy people have used can use you see this at all? I see that there are a lot of times especially on twitter You have people Clearly articulating their relationships to other people through twitter and a lot of the time that's through the retweet and the at reply You'll see people retweeting or at replying significant things significant people have said in order to affiliate themselves with that person so when Gary Vaynerchuk was promoting his book kevin rose did a great deal of promotion for it I know um kevin rose does a lot of promotion for tim ferris as well And they you know, they use each other social networks to kind of promote their interests But because so much of the status structure in this kind of web 2.0 scene is based on entrepreneurialism And the sense of individualism and you know brashness risk-taking competition There's not really so much of a negative connotation around self-promotion that there might be in other communities But I think it's a sort of uneasy road that a lot of people walk because I do think there's a sense that you can Become known as only a self-promoter and not having any actual skill or talent to back that up And I think that's kind of what's happened to julia allison is she's not seen as someone with any discernible skill So I think the reason that she's got this group of people that absolutely can't stand her Is because they see her as kind of this brainless talking head who's gotten all of this attention and visibility But has nothing to back it up unlike someone like say You know jack dorsi who's clearly like an excellent technologist who's built a successful company and in the process of building another successful company Yeah, joe. Thank you. I was pretty interesting. Um, but I was I don't know if I was disappointed or surprised But I thought it was interesting that you kind of came up short at the very end and said, oh, this is just something That's interesting. We need to look at So I don't know if you have in your other work taken of a position as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing And what would it take you what would it take for you to think it was a good thing or a bad thing to actually cross that line? Well I do think it's a bad thing But as an ethnographer I try not to put value judgments on the type of things that my subjects my informants do I mean everybody that I interviewed for this piece and all the people that I've interviewed for my subsequent projects Who engage in these type of practices are really like interesting smart generous people You know, I wouldn't say that I think that what they're doing is wrong per se What I think becomes problematic is when we see it as a larger pattern of the infiltration of neoliberal market logics into more and more intimate areas of personal life which in the dissertation slash book is Going to be what is really sort of what you said that's sort of the endpoint that we we get to this point where Market logics become so important or they become so infiltrated in our day-to-day interactions That they affect the way that we talk to our loved ones on twitter or the way that we present ourselves online If that even if that's the primary way that we present ourselves to our friends and family on say facebook or something like that so I think I think the danger there is is very much one of creating a A neoliberal subjectivity that people just kind of they regulate themselves to be good capital You know good sort of employees or good Consumers within capitalism the market no longer has to regulate them or the government or corporations don't have to regulate their behavior They do it themselves You know if you're if you're terrified that you're going to be fired if you say anything political on twitter Then you're going to keep those opinions to yourself And that's that's sort of falling into this idea that the market rhetoric and what a corporation wants you to do Should be sort of the That should be the ultimate value or the or the utmost value I have one other comment Sure, which was that the fact that like the one person said oh, I need realized I need to have You know some time to myself and time with my family It seems to me that the the exit though they come back or the disenchantment Is pretty common in these medium cycles cycles is actually it is a trope within the cycle itself You get more attention for saying oh my god. I'm not going to tweet for a week. Yeah So I'm also wondering are there people that Sort of subsequently challenged. I'm asking about the challenging issues, right? And where it's not just a trope within the rhetoric Of the cycle itself You mean people who actually do quit? Yeah, or do subsequently challenge it in some way and I don't know what that means necessarily But did you encounter that beyond these you know performances basically of exit but then the return I think that Beyond the performances of exit I did see many many people who did exit And I would say that virtually I would say the great majority of the interviews that I did for my dissertation The people that I talked to were no longer living as public lives as they were when I interviewed them that the Drawbacks have become enough for them to say this is no longer something that I want to engage in because the cost Are too high for me or my family or or whatnot Generally, I don't see them challenging it and that they don't push back There's always another group of people who are willing to take on the mantle I mean if you you know, this is all kind of dated data at this point because when I was doing the project Dig was the hippest company in san francisco and it was one everybody wanted to work for and now we've gone through Two more iterations where then it was twitter and now it's four square. I mean it's it's very it's very rapidly changing so the The cohort overturned so quickly that I think that there's it's hard for like one individual person to say well I'm stepping down even if they write this dramatic blog post as you said and they never update the blog again What impact does that actually have but I think that this lifestyle takes so much ongoing labor and self-monitoring that it becomes Confining um adam jackson who was one of my informants who's just like was so hard-working and was just like such a Interesting motivated guy. He wrote this This big blog post when he when he pulled back from public living saying that he you know He was sick of people tweeting nasty things to him And he felt that he had gotten caught up too much in the cycle of attention that he was just becoming Addicted to sort of the validation you get from the feedback and he was like, you know I'm changing everything and he actually left San Francisco. He moved across the country He completely dislocated himself from this this overall network But I don't think his actions necessarily had an impact on anybody besides himself One of the ones that you seem to touch on was people who share about their lives a lot, but don't necessarily move like beyond that in terms of reputation and it's like the celebrity of of like existence on the in this web presence celebrity um and I I was specifically I'm curious to hear more about about that group of people and How much they decide to maintain their presence or like retract and specifically my interest comes from my personal Interest in Mormon housewife vloggers. Okay. I don't know if you know about them. I will get Because that that like that's one specific group where people are sharing huge amounts of details about their lives and They don't seem to be generating these kind of comments that they are generating attention I will they are generating a negative comment But they they're generating attention Kind of thank you Well, I think the first thing that's important is to distinguish between status and reputation because they're really two separate things You know when I was starting my work on this project a lot of the literature around reputation reputation mechanisms In some ways resemble some of the theories I have here about status affordances But status is really a much broader concept than reputation is, you know, somebody can have an excellent reputation And maybe they have high social status Somebody can also have extremely high social status, but not a great reputation because reputation is really a marker of like Trustworthiness reliability and things like that. And I don't know if we would say that like donald trump Is a like trustworthy reliable for somebody's high status in a certain way because of the attention He gets um, I think in to answer your question. I think there's certainly ways of People putting personal information out there that isn't done strategically in a way to inculcate a larger audience I think within a lot of these niche communities There's different norms about what it's appropriate to put online and what it's not the project I'm working on right now is about um online conspicuous consumption specifically looking at fashion bloggers And fashion bloggers will put a huge amount of information about the types of goods they consume How often they go shopping what the inside of their closet looks like etc, etc But most of them don't even use their last name or say where they work or anything So I think that and they and they have like fairly large vocal audiences and Equally large vocal groups of haters, but the dynamic looks completely different than it does in this web 2.0 world because it's based on This this value system around like style and appearance, which the web 2.0 world is not At all based around does that answer your question? A little bit, okay Um, I'm all right. That's uh within Your scope, but could you talk a little bit about the predictability value either in a commercial circle or in a political circle? So for instance, given that Your twitter account is following This and this and that person and in facebook you are in those groups Well, we could predict that you will be voting In such and such a way and you will be buying such and such products um I don't yeah, I'm sorry. I don't really think I can speak to that. I don't have any solid data I think that would confirm or it's not that either way I think a lot of the time people follow people on twitter For a huge variety of reasons. So it would be difficult to say You know, some people might follow lady gaga because they love her and some people might follow lady gaga because they hate her And so one group of those people is much more likely to buy a lady gaga album Yeah I really like how you kind of frame this and also what you can talk about in comments about How this how this might affect individuals in terms of the logic I'm coming from this from a perspective from thinking about my research about the technology and freedom And um, particularly the choice that individuals have about the life they want to lead And how that translates when they have to do this in a technological environment where some of the decisions what they can do And what they can't do is already predetermined Um, so I'm just interested in how your respondents frame their decisions about this Do they do that feel that they do this is great. They give them more choice. They've got all these options Um, or do they talk about you know constraints obligation? Is there a sense of pressure? and Maybe a kind of a a point where this can crystallize is the moment of opting out How do they construct this moment of opting out? Is it because they are you know, basically their body can't take it anymore or whatever or is it a choice and indeed what consequences come That's a really great great question and um, I think that I I think many people felt that there was an obligation or a pressure to engage in some sort of public life If nothing else because of their jobs and I think that increasingly there's a larger number of professions where Having some sort of public persona becomes part of doing your job in it adequately So for example, I interviewed sarah lacy who's a technology journalist and she said that her job had two parts One was actually writing her books and writing her articles and the other one was being sarah lacy the person which involved like Going to dinners with people networking going to conferences giving speeches all that type of things which are mostly like unpaid Acts of work, but which promoted her as a brand so to help her get better freelance gigs and you know better Book sales and that type of thing and I've seen that in a lot of other people I've talked to journalists Especially academics anybody who's an entrepreneur is trying to get some kind of funding or feedback So there definitely is a sense that there's some kind of economic or financial obligation But I do think some people took real pleasure in doing this they really enjoyed it At least to a certain extent. I mean the the way that the san francisco social life is structured around high and low status. It's almost Hilarious, I mean you have these tech parties where there's like a Velvet rope and everybody's standing outside somebody pulls up in a car and they're an entrepreneur And they just like breathe in through the line and go inside You know it's a it's almost like a parody of the way that the celebrity the traditional celebrity world works So I think that there is a sense that there are certain people who They follow the exploits of this kind of group of entrepreneurs through twitter or through blogs and they strategically move to san francisco Virtually everyone that I interviewed had moved to san francisco to take part in the tech scene And they say this is what i'm going to do I'm going to move here to make it big and whether making it big to them looks like i'm going to start a company I'm going to have this Great idea or i'm going to meet all these people that I really admire Or whatever and I think that the more successful a person becomes the more it tips over to The obligation and pressure side of the equation than the The the sort of strategic decision i'm going to do x y and z in order to become Better known i mean the people that I interviewed were very very intelligent people and most of them were fairly Cognizant of the choices that they did make they you know I went out three nights this week to tech party so I could meet more people I would have rather have stayed home and watched tv But I have to do this to establish myself or i'm working 100 hours a week now because i'm only 23 And this means i'll be a millionaire by the time that i'm 30 You know if that if that if that answers your question Yeah in the back Good um, I did a whole comparison of brown william assange and the wiki leaks and the government versus wiki leaks about you and facebook and how We're our own personal brand i've also done some work in the youth space and looked at what danis and what the digital native i'm interested to learn if you have exposure Have done some research or maybe i'll start my own research How younger generations are quick to adopt a lot of new technology and go out there and start using it But they never really quite think about the self editing or the aspects that over time as they grow older How that might impact their lives And i don't know if you've done some research in that area or what you've seen as far as the aspects backlash with the abuse and the bullying And maybe you know as they get older how they proceed with themselves in the professional world You know that's that's a terrific question. I actually have done quite a bit of research on that. I was uh I co-wrote the literature review that the bergman center put out on youth privacy and reputation and data And i've been doing pretty extensive ethnographic work in the southeast united states for all of fall 2010 We went to three different cities and interviewed like a hundred kids. Um, and I think that the There's a there's a very common misconception that kids don't care about privacy because they use social technologies to put personal information out there And we found that Overall to be completely untrue kids care really deeply about privacy They just tend to concept conceptualize it in different Ways than adults do at this point virtually every kid that we talked to from you know 13 to 19 from Homeless kids and gang members the kids in sort of these very wealthy private schools have been lectured at some point or another about You know putting personal information online because they might get fired for it in the future But because interacting with their peers is such a hugely significant part of that is done on facebook The there's not really an option to opt Out it's like, you know not having a telephone when we were teenagers or just choosing never to speak with anyone I mean the the social costs to not interacting with people using social technologies when you're a teenager are incredibly Incredibly high so we found that teens have a really wide variety of strategies to manage their privacy Whether that means that there's a certain technology that they use for their most private thoughts for some kids That's text messaging for other kids. It's a private protected twitter account where they only friend They're really they're close intimate friends Dana's been talking a lot lately about social steganography, which is the idea of putting coded messages out there in plain sight So the people who are in the know understand what the message means but to everybody else it looks meaningless and if you have If you've ever been in a front seat while two teenagers were in the back seat They can have an entire conversation about something and you don't understand a single word and we see a lot of that going on On facebook as well. So I think that there is there certainly is a difference in socioeconomic classes the higher up you get in the socioeconomic Spectrum the more conscious we see kids being with this type of thing because they've been You know sort of brow beaten into i'm going to construct a profile that's really strategic So that a college admissions officer will see it and think i'm a well-rounded person So we interviewed one kid who had like a picture of himself with this like you know Multicultural group of friends a picture of himself playing soccer And like a picture of himself getting an award or something and those are the only pictures he had out there Everything else was untagged or deleted because he wanted to Strategically present a certain type of face of himself to the world So I think that that looks different than some of these techniques to the idea of self editing and presenting a certain type of yourself Um is is fairly similar. Um a lot of kids also just don't think anyone would ever care Like why would anyone care about me? I'm just an average kid. Why would anyone look at my facebook? So I think that there's um some pretty complex dynamics around around some of these issues when it comes to teenagers But I we have seen teenagers engaging in these particular strategies as well, but it's you know, it's it's not a It's a sort of a niche group of teens like a very specific type of teenager that's going to do this type of work I don't think I've specifically got you know have done a study of that You mean in terms of how people understand the costs of what they're doing or the trade-off Yeah, so they first like oh, I'll start liking some of these things because they're an interest to mine But then they get a whole list of stuff that just drives them crazy that it's the backlash It's really up to the marketer to be savvy and to target and not Inundated I think I think the message but sometimes the customer Is this woman mentioned about opting out you know emails or other things what Did you find that you know people move from one trend and then they like all right, I don't see the value of this anymore Enough of that. Let's look for the next big facebook to the next big Four square I mean, I definitely do think people move through social technologies I mean one of the things that was trendy when I was right Well, it was still being used pretty heavily when I was writing this dissertation was dodgeball Which was the precursor to force for which no longer even exists anymore So and and obviously the dig is being super trendy But I think the people do understand that there are there's a trade-off with a lot of the social applications that they use But I don't have any particular Data on the the types of actions that they might do Subsequently, but thanks for your question. Yeah So Alice you talked about how the technology builds in mechanisms for status affordances Used for square as an example that it pushes people to go out and Shop and go to restaurants and that might not be what as a society we were on Are you aware of the use of those Status affordances to drive socially beneficial behavior for example in the non-profit space and other ways to be thinking about What you're observing that Can be powerful ways for the next wave of say web 3.0 that would start to build in ideas that we're seeing in Gotting the data Yeah, I mean I think a lot of the rhetoric around gamification Which is very much focused on giving people rewards having leaderboards creating competitions out of day-to-day Events is very much focused on socially beneficial behavior I mean, I know that there's tons of applications that are trying to make people healthier through these types of things Have them exercise more walk around more go to the gym And I think that status is definitely a very key part of a lot of these particular These particular things. So yeah, I think I think it's absolutely true that we could use status as a way to reinforce positive social behaviors I think what's important is that people who are designing applications Understand what type of behavior they're rewarding Encouraging or discouraging when they're building the application, you know, I think Yeah, I mean four square has been super explicit about it Facebook tends to be a little bit, you know murkier when it comes to disclosing their overall plans for humanity, but The yeah, I do think that there is an understanding of that. Um, I don't know if people have necessarily Framed it in terms of status, but I think that if you look into a lot of the gamification literature a lot of the issues are quite quite similar The Discussion about how kids are aware of what they're doing and also their behavior online because you know We often talk about the digital divide and it's all about access to the internet Broadband group revolves around that and it just strikes me that that's much too simplistic because you have this divide And it's largely socioeconomic as well about not just getting onto the internet, but about Perceiving yourself within it. Mm-hmm being able to brand yourself being able to rebrand yourself And in a way if if kids aren't educated about that that that just reinforces a huge social divide Yeah, exactly. I mean it continues to reward the people who are Successfully using these technologies to begin with and I think in terms of the digital divide You know my sort of my thing that I'm always hammering on the be in my bonnet is about filtered internet access versus unfiltered internet access Which I know will not be used to many people in this room, but when we're talking to kids from lower socioeconomic Conditions a lot of the time the only time they can get on the internet is at school or the library And they've got these very heavy internet filters put on and in a lot of schools they filter out social applications At all they definitely filter out facebook often they do twitter some kids are moving to twitter because it's less filtered And so you know the the ability to learn how to use these applications in ways that are safe effective You know interesting anything like that is being is being Kind of removed in a lot of ways so I don't know if I would say that I think people should be taught how to do these types of techniques And it should be advocated, but it certainly does create another Class of people who are able to participate in a way that other people are maybe not But you can't if you're if you're if your job involves being on your feet as a retail worker for 10 hours a day you're not sitting in front of a desk How do you self-brand yourself then and what good does it get to self-brand yourself as like I work at the Gap You know, I mean it assumes a particular slice of life and expands it to the way that everybody's life works You know, that's just not In their social life is online Yeah, everybody and there's so yeah everybody Well, I wouldn't say everybody but you know a wide swath of of the united states Especially is using these technologies for their social life But I think that the When when you get these blurring between these sort of traditional boundaries of online and offline is where you see I think a lot of these kind of techniques coming into play Yeah Great great talk, Alice. I think Coming into this I realized the lens I was bringing is a sense of place a lot of what you've done is on the person or people But I'm a sense of place on on on even more specifically I was thinking that the economic engine behind web 240 and and the your timing You know, I don't know why you decided 2007 to start but the timing you had what kind of oxygen Do you have in the room? First of all, you had a down economy. So people needed stuff to do. I mean, I'm simple but for illustration You have a tech media that needed their darlings and their cadence their cycles and then the The economic model the entrepreneurial model of of kind of profit things up, but specifically there was a lot of cash Yep after the downturn that needed somewhere to go But more specifically it would be interesting to get your comments on how we're starting to see cracks A lot of the conversation the tech media now is it's a bubble and what I keep thinking is that people are missing the point Maybe it's not the bubble but things like angel gate and those 41 million dollars going to color Maybe it's the crack in the Model below it. Not that these companies are going to crash But maybe this whole system people are going to get to work now As the economy changes as people get more sophisticated Anyways, that that I would love to hear your comments more about the place in the economic engine beyond it I think that's a really that's a very astute question I think that I interviewed a couple of bc's for this project and I would love to interview many more And I think that so much of what venture capitalists are funding is based on perception You know there's something you hear over and over from bc's is It's like it's it's really like sexist saying about how everybody wants to go to the prom with a pretty girl or something When there's one company that's hyped they all will kind of like pounce on it, right? So there's so much of this perception of like what is the trendy new coolest thing? Which goes along in a lot of ways with what company fits the mold of a company we funded before and a lot of times It's you know, I have I have a chapter in the book about gender and entrepreneurship And how there's a certain type of entrepreneur who's going to be more likely to be funded Which is the sort of like young dude, you know, you see a lot of these company funders who are under 30 Most of them are under 40. It's it's very much sort of perpetrating this particular cycle But in an answer to your sort of larger question about the economic engine and the And and the bubble, I mean, yeah, this this definitely did have a function, you know And I think that the it it was the web 2.0 Buzzword as you know coin boy O'Reilly in some ways was meant to create a schism between the dot-com bus Which it failed and this new thing which is going to be really successful, right web 2.0 Everyone invest in this because it's radically different from what came before it Although there's really not very much radical difference between web 2.0 technologies and what's, you know Now recursively called web 1.0. I mean Wikipedia could have been built Many years before it was blogs were around in that entire time So yeah, I think that there's a very sort of strategic set of business interests behind promoting this idea of web 2.0 This ideology and in the in in the larger product that kind of go into the history of that a little bit that there's these two intertwined threads that emerge around the same time and the first is this very Idealistic utopian notion that we can use technology to solve social problems And the other one is this like 50 year history of venture-backed entrepreneurial capitalism And I think web 2.0 is where they really collide where you have this sense that we can fund these really like idealistic social visions That are going to benefit the world as a whole, you know And so we have people writing these like, you know breathless papers in 2006 2007 about like tagging and folksonomy and crowdsourcing and whatever And you know, it's going to change the world in this like really big impactful way Yeah Yeah in the back A quick question. I was wondering how you think Presidential election cycles might might fit into this was a lot of the popular rhetoric about horizontal integration during the obama campaign a blip or a pause in I guess a lot of momentum of those buildings in this type of discourse or was it a moment of like Disillusionment and has popular belief since been restored and you anticipate A lot of that rhetoric changed again I'm not sure if I fully understand your question. I'll try to get stabbed at it And you'll tell me if I'm if I'm going off the rails. I mean, I think that there's I think that there's a heavy thread that runs through the way people think about web 2.0 Which is social technologies is democratizing in general and allowing more people to participate in a broad variety of processes so, um, you know citizen journalism and you know increased political participation and in my fashion blogger project The democratization of fashion, you know, all these sort of like elite structures crumbling and through social technologies More and more people can participate in them. Um, you know when when this when this rhetoric first starts kind of grinding away Obama is like he's not even slightly on on the scene. So I think it's quite separate from him I think he was able to sort of harness a particular moment in time very very smartly with a sense of tool with a set of tools that sort of tied into people's desire to be like modern Participants in this like new wonderful world of social technology I mean, I was in San Francisco when Obama was elected and it was just, you know, I think every single person In that city felt that they had personally elected him Themself. I mean it was this a sense that, you know, this is something that this is a guy who understands our technology He understands web 2.0. He understands the modern economy. He's you know, our president. We were able to participate in that um I'm not sure if that answered your question more or less well, I mean, uh, the only follow-up to that might be um Or market logics to You know, my my enthusiasm not be No, what might it be impossible at this point for this type of enthusiasm? Not necessarily the same analysis to be generated again during a huge political spectrum. I'm really I'm not sure. I mean my gut feeling used to say sure, you know, it's not going to look exactly the same But everything is cyclical, you know, I would I'd be very surprised if we never saw another broad uprising of excitement around For a presidential election, but I don't know if it's going to happen in 2012 Traditional celebrity you have thousands of people each year going to hollywood to be famous or into driving taxis and waiting tables I wonder if you had the serve a similar thing where people are sort of Staying up till three in the morning every day tweeting and they just don't get that following And if there's anything that makes the people who are really successful different or if they're just lucky Um, I think that there's a lot of it is access to the network I think that once you're vetted by somebody who's already in this sort of group of web 2.0 insiders then That opens up a lot of possibilities for you more than you tweeting into the void is going to on the other hand There's such a large people who really want this that they all interact with each other And so you can gain quite a bit of status just from being a frequent tweeter when everybody else you interact with Is just a frequent tweeter as well. Like it's a pretty it's a pretty elongated social graph You know it has it has very broad ends We have lots of people who really want to become this like famous web 2.0 celebrity and they you know They get asked to speak at one conference and you know, they're really really excited about it But they're still not getting their product idea funded for a hundred million dollars or or whatever Successful but didn't move to san francisco At the time that I was doing the study I was in san francisco So I didn't really interview anybody who was outside of it I've done a lot of comparative field work in the new york tech scene Just because that's where I did my phd and I had a lot of access to it And so we've really seen an uptake in the new york tech scene in the last two years And so I think that you're maybe going to start seeing a little bit of a disbursement of geography where it's no longer like If you want to be in web 2.0, you move to san francisco now there's Few companies in new york, but it's still there's still really no comparison I mean san francisco is still You know, if you're a young kid with a dream in your heart and you want to work in web 2.0 That's where you go Be anywhere to blog being The face-to-face connections are incredibly important And this the city is saturated with web 2.0 in a way that no other place I've ever been is not even close So just by virtue of being there you get hooked into all these ways of thinking about technology They're very much like on the cutting edge of the way people think about social tech Okay, it looks like are we out of time or any more questions? All right, great. Well, thank you everybody. Thanks very much