#14: Social Signaling and Status-Seeking
In this edition, let's explore mental models on virtue signaling
Disclaimer: This edition was written by our community member, Varun Choraria.
Dear Reader,
I hope you’re doing well.
In a few of our previous editions, we’ve explored the social disconnect dilemma, and how to have conversations at work place- which reflect the outlook and brand of your work culture. In this edition, let’s extend that to the realm of personal branding, and how and why we want to represent ourselves better online.
All editions will be linked below, for your binge reading list for the weekend.
So sit back, relax and enjoy the edition. If you’ve got constructive feedback to share- I’m easily reachable on slack or on Twitter.
Week in Review: Highlights of our community
Rishab Mehta, in #general, asked about WhatsApp APIs. He runs a FinTech venture called GrayQuest, and they’re just getting started with the process of vendor selection. Lalit Pandey is working with a third party vendor on building a sales bot on WhatsApp chat. Do you know anyone are you working on something similar yourself? Jump in, and see if you can add value!
Pranay, in #need-introductions, is looking for a senior strategy decision maker at cult.fit. Do you think you can help him get introduced? Some context- A friend of his is building something similar for the Brazilian market, and wanted a few pointers.
In #philosophical, I’d shared an interesting blog on the different kinds of potential. Here’s an excerpt from the blog:
Religion also belongs in the Goals quadrant alongside fights. Religious people like the ideas of purpose and submission simultaneously, so abstract-negative potential is really what religion offers to believers. Purpose is submission to goal-debt. Maybe “god” is just an adversary in a fight you know you can’t win, and for some reason you like that, so you submit right away. Hmm… Say Uncle, Uncle Sam, Uncle God…
Rishi, one of our most active members, has been sharing some pretty interesting anecdotes in #random:
Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous continuous partial attention. We’ll scan our email, write something down, check Twitter, and do it all over again, never really focusing on any specific task. In this state of perpetual distraction, breathing becomes shallow and erratic. Sometimes we won’t breathe at all for a half minute or longer. The problem is serious enough that the National Institutes of Health has enlisted several researchers, including Dr. David Anderson and Dr. Margaret Chesney, to study its effects over the past decades. Chesney told me that the habit, also known as “email apnea,” can contribute to the same maladies as sleep apnea.
- Nestor, James. Breath (p. 172). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Seriously, check them out! They’re great thought pieces.
Social Signaling and Status-Seeking
In an age where building in public, doing more open source work and community building have become 101s for most tech startups and founders- status seeking is gaining a new form.
Alex Danco puts forth an interesting description of how status works, in the modern world:
An interesting thought that stood out:
Status is both of those things. It’s a unit of what you have, and it’s also a unit of what you’re owed.
By extension, and given the rise of creators and communities, it’s also signaling one interesting aspect- shared experiences. Here’s another excerpt to ponder over:
Every shade and stripe of every possible variety of connection is about wanting, above all else, to be known; for someone else to see as much of you as possible. Shared experience is important. It’s not everything, but it’s something, because nobody wants to be explaining at forty to a hostile audience why they are the way they are, but you don’t want to punch below your weight class, either, and wind up with somebody who only loves you because they don’t know any better—because the day they do know better is the day they’ll walk out the door.
But, with shared experiences comes criticism, of all kinds. Ava from Bookbear express makes an interesting point here:
When you share things about yourself willingly—posting pictures of yourself online, writing a blog—you’re making criticism inevitable. You’re releasing information into the wild and people can respond to it however they want. They can approach it with the right context, or absolutely no context. You’re allowing yourself to be seen, to be known, and in return you might be seen in ways you realllly don’t want yourself to be seen.
In our previous editions, we also did a deep-dive on solving the apparent disconnect social media problem:
When asked how often they feel like no one knows them well, more than half of the respondents (54%) surveyed said they feel that way always or sometimes.
At least two in five surveyed sometimes or always feel as though they lack companionship (43%), that their relationships are not meaningful (43%), that they are isolated from others (43%), and/or that they are no longer close to anyone (39%).
Those who never have in-person interactions are also less likely to have “balance” in their lives, with only 36% saying they get the right amount of sleep (vs. 50% of those who have daily in-person interactions) and 37% saying they get the right amount of family time (vs. 65%).
Now let’s tie all of these factoids to real-life events.
The living room used to be the social media decades ago. So if you look at our parents, they mostly spent their entire lives in the same city/neighborhood. Their children, siblings, etc. lived within close proximity too. The concept of the nuclear family didn’t exist.
Today, an average of 30% of people aged 18–24 years move to another city, and either live alone, with a partner or with transient roommates. Every aspect of life is now lived in transit. Your food, laundry, even your maids are all in transit and at your command, controlled by software.
There are two types of family- (1) blood-related family and (2) chosen family. In either use case, the broad assumption (read: constraint) is that we want to remain close-knit as that bond we share is sacred. Without checking on these people every day, we feel empty and alone.
And so I take your leave here- curious to know your thoughts that you can drop them in the comments below, or start a thread on slack:
Amongst the ‘gift and flex’ culture across social media and in our lives, what do you think might be a perfect balance between building deeper tribes vs. being a power networker- knowing everybody and everywhere?
In terms of feeling safe online- when we’re sharing ourselves via virtue signaling, do you think it’s alright for people to engage in anyway they can- positive or negative? Because when you cascade down this same philosophy, they’re also essentially doing the same thing- just to a different tribe.
How do you attenuate the noise-to-signal ratio better- so it just becomes enough for you to maintain offline sanity and build/represent your social being online? What’s been your story around this?
I’d greatly appreciate if you could share your thoughts around this- it could also help us build our slack community better!
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