notes
prestige dynamics of newsgroups
7 september 2003
Based in observations of a newsgroup thread in soc.women [*]
Premise: The chat begins with a post describing speed dating. The initiater of the thread wants to know if anyone has any experiences to share.
Characters: "James King" and "Laura". From the name, it could be a he or possibly she, but one can sense James's homophobia and quickly decides that it's a guy. James is the first to respond to the initiater's post. He/she relates a funny personal anecodotal experience with speed dating, painting a half-funny, half-horrific tale of a speed dating game gone wrong as participants get blindfolded and kiss other participants, only to discover that all the participants are men. James's homophobia is evident, but his humor is redeeming. One suspects from his rhetorical style of charming circumloqution that James is from the UK (later confirmed). It is only with the aid of cultural models as described by Holland and Skinner that it's possible to label James as a homophobe, and a Brit. Cues from James's behavior during speed dating lead the audience to believe that he is homophobic, and his witty and redeeming rhetorical strategy suggests his Brit origin.
James's first few posts are funny, candid, homophobic, and slightly graphic. It is clear that he is playing to the audience, and here, Goffman's analogy of theatrical performance is quite appropriate. James is negotiating his identity in this chat thread to be a charming, funny, authoratative, and exhibitionistic figure (with all of his graphic and crass candor). Every prompt from a fellow poster is taken by James to be another opportunity to charm and impress. His presumed unintentional mannerisms seem so natural that they come off as genuine. The audience has reason to believe that this is a very natural identity for him. Looking at James in Holland and Skinner's scales of prestige, his instinct to defend his viewpoint and to illustrate the superior depth of his knowledge by pointing out the faults in the reasoning of others suggest that he is actively defending his high prestige. He is especially critical of other males in the chat thread, suggesting that he wants to portray himself as an alpha male.
A turning point in the thread comes when "Laura" enters the chat scene. Laura posts a confident and knowledge retort to James. James is impressed by Laura's confident style, and that she doesn't contradict him but rather, complements his claims about speed dating with her own anecdotes and exhibition of personal depth. James responds to Laura and begins to talk more at depth than he had previously, in what can be fairly interpreted as an attempt to impress and flirt with Laura. He coyly propositions her. He views her as having high prestige, for his comments exhibit a high-level of intimacy with her. Laura responds positively to James's flirtations, upping the ante and challenging him with flirtations. James challenges Laura by becoming much more sexually explicit and graphic. Laura ends the thread with an invitation to James to "cut to the chase" and proposes that they trade pics in private.
Laura attracts James because she recognizes his prestige in knowledge. When they recognize that they have equivalently high prestige, they tune out the rest of the people on the thread. In one such intrusion by a third poster, James quickly and rudely dismisses the poster. James defends his already negotiated identity as the thread alpha male, and speed dating guru. Laura and James, in recognition of their mutual interest, converse with more intimacy (albeit still in a public forum) than with others, and eventually ignore all the other posters.
As the nature of online identities go, neither James nor Laura avails of their explicit social roles, e.g. job, role in family, etc. Thus Simmel's theories are largely untestable.
Conversational Sketch
In this sketch, I interpret Holland and Skinner's Prestige and Intimacy over a node graph. Each node represents a poster on the chat thread. Blue indicates male, and red, female. The size of the bubble corresponds to the size of the ego of the poster, as portrayed by the poster him/herself (a la Goffman). JK, aka James King, negotiates himself a large, alpha male ego, a strong presence. L, aka Laura also has a strong presence. Each rounded arrow (looks like a parenthetical marker) represents an interaction (a post). The further the arrow gets toward the person being addressed, the more prestige the speaker has won or exhibited, either through gaining the upper hand of knowledge, or wit, or whatnot. The intensity of the arrow represents how personally intense the message is. The yellow aurora indicates the exchange of intimacy. As the sketch shows, JK does not respond to the girl represented by the pink node in the upper left. The majority of JK's arrows dominate the other posters and his dominance is illustrated by this. JK has a slight feud (the temporal dimensions of this not being evident) with the male in the lower left. The male is the lower left portrays himself with a big ego and is perhaps the biggest challenge to JK's negotiated alpha male status in the group. The arrow count and intensity is not balanced, and arrows tend to overlap each other in direction ())(. Lack of symmetry is a visual indication of conflict. By contrast, JK's relationship with L is well-balanced intensity-wise and always meets in the middle. This indicates equal prestige, and sets the context for the ensuing intimacy. The visual symmetry of the arrows indicates an ideal meeting of like-minded identities. This sketch does not consider the temporal dimension, but an animated version may do the job.