“Social Scores As a Status Symbol” Today, themes of social acceptance and conformity are prominent across many industries and aspects of social life. Social acceptance is especially important when considering technology’s impact on communities; as social media, a social acceptance tool, becomes a dominate resource for marketing, networking, and sharing ideas, the way in which people traditionally interact is changing. Cell phones and the growth of social media platforms have created displaced meaning for social interactions, “because it consists in cultural meaning that has deliberately been removed from the daily life of a community and relocated in a distant cultural domain,” (McCracken, 104). Communities have sprung up within online social domains, social media, and many social interactions within Western culture no longer take place face to face; a “distant cultural domain” such as Twitter or Instagram has become the place for conversation, interaction, learning and creating. The domains have also become a place where social ranking is determined. It is difficult to determine if these cultural domains benefit or harm society but it’s safe to say they probably do a bit of both, “everyday technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that,” (Postman). There are obvious positives and not so obvious negatives that are a result of social domains. The benefits to a “distant cultural domain” like social media include increased access to information and eased communication; people are connecting around the world, having conversations and exchanging ideas which has resulted in increased globalization; learning about the world has never been as accessible as it is today. The detriments of this technology are much more complex and difficult to predict or understand, “when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open,” (Postman). People must use social domain technology with caution because there is no way to determine the future impact of these
technologies; “the ‘unspecified’ character of the future is not only an advantage, but also a weakness,” (McCracken, 107). A potential weakness social media can bring about is a system of strict social rankings influenced by one’s behavior and other’s opinions of them. Social acceptance has become quantified through the evolution of social media; followers and number of likes or comments are quantifiable metrics that determine societal acceptance. There are expected behaviors a person must project; expected behaviors “involve matters of etiquette, dress, deportment, gesture, intonation, dialect, vocabulary, small bodily movements and automatically expressed evaluations concerning both the substance and the details of life,” (Goffman, 300). These behaviors make or break a person’s social status; people applaud expected behaviors by liking or commenting on a post, or following a person’s profile. People criticize behavior that does not fall in the acceptable realm and the number of likes or comments suggest the degree to which an audience enjoys content; social acceptance drives engagements. Engagement is a major theme in “Nosedive” an episode of Black Mirror that portrays a world where everyone has a social rank in the form of a number. Everything in this world is pastel and perfect, playing on the aesthetic that many Instagram bloggers use in content. People rank each other after every interaction through a social media program on a scale of 1-5; with every post or interaction, a person’s individual rank can increase or decrease and the pressure for positive interactions results in strange, fake-nice, behavior (Wright). There are perks to interacting with someone who has a high score and negative side effects to interacting with lowscored individuals; this system puts tremendous pressure on those with low scores for they are outcasts. The reason the main character in Black Mirror overextends herself to raise her score is “the same reason all but only the most wealthy buy status symbols… We want to belong,” (Cottom). A high ranking social score is the ultimate status symbol in this alternate world, “a
status symbol may be ranked on a scale of prestige, according to the amount of social value that is placed upon it relative to other statuses in the same sector of social life. An individual may be rated on a scale of esteem, depending on how closely his performance approaches the ideal established for that particular status,” (Goffman, 294). Essentially, prestige is determined by social value metrics which are established within sectors of social life. While an episode of Black Mirror can be written off as a science-fiction TV show, the ideas behind this episode are unfortunately not far from reality. The concept of a social score as a status symbol has become reality in China where the state has been working to set up "social credit” since 2014 (Ma). There is no other system like this in the world; “like private credit scores, a person's social score can move up and down depending on their behavior. The exact methodology is a secret — but examples of infractions include bad driving, smoking in nonsmoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online,” (Ma). The system rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior and China has seen better behavior from citizens across the board since implementing the system (Ma). The change in behavior is a direct result of fear, fear of what a low social credit will bring. The social credit system has placed tremendous pressure on low-scored individuals who now face restrictions on travel, internet, education and career progress; there is even a “prototype blacklist” meant to be used by employers for punishment (Ma). In China, the social domain has extended beyond social media and into the government, where the numeric value of someone’s social score has a greater direct impact on their life than it does in Western culture where social media is the only loose ranking system. China’s “social credit” score system has been called a “dystopian nightmare” by Westerners who value freedom and independence, however this nightmare could quickly become a reality in Western culture as social media becomes more influential in social life, careeres, and
credibility (Rollet). This dystopian nightmare understands that “closing the gap between the “real” and the “ideal” in social life is one of the most pressing problems a culture must deal with,” (McCracken, 105). The purpose of social scores is to work towards an “ideal” world.
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