I was at the movies yesterday. The movie I’ve seen is probably the most prolific within my social graph this fall—I’m talking of course of The Social Network.

I don’t want to talk about the movie itself, as I view it as a cinematographic production with its artisitc freedoms and really-that’s not a domain I am all too firm in.

What I want to talk about however is the role “status” played in the movie, and how I find that this is applicable and applied in a lot of contexts, most of the time unknowingly.

It seems to me, as it is depicted in the movie, both the inventor and the invention were primarily conceived by the apparent gains in status they provide. That is, fictional Mark Zuckerberg was looking for a way to rehabilitate his tarnished reputation and reconcile the fact that he was indeed not part of the elite of the elite, those clubs which, in the movie at least, form the social stratosphere of that prestigious university. He needed a way to up his own status (and apparently, he really had business cards that said “I’m CEO, bitch,”) thus the invention. And he needed a gain of status for the users of the site to entice them to join. So it’s all about status.

I’ve stumbled across this thought at this years all2gethernow (or #a2n) where I found myself in the situation of discussing the merits of streaming and other potential revenue streams for artists/labels numerous times when it hit me: If you think back to the days of LPs, having a large collection of vinyl wasn’t so much about the music. You could have easily taped the music from friends. (Yes, there was the obvious degradation stemming from the process of taping and the inherent qualities of music cassettes, but MP3-downloads have their process-bound degradation as well and especially had them in the early days of napster and widespread p2p-filesharing.)

What you bought with LPs and by having a large LP collection was an expression of yourself, status in your peer-group and possibly success with the girls.

You can identify this pattern in all sorts of different contexts: Street Cred in Rapper Culture is nothing more than status amongst your peers, even in communities that define themselves more by utility than style, there is a status hierarchy.

So to succesfully have a play with consumers, one should appeal to their sense of status.

But here’s the kicker: status is highly contextualised. Status in one social surrounding might as well prove detrimental in another setting. Status is not only individually different but intra-individually as well. That is why general-purpose networks have such a hard time grappling with confusing and oftentimes contradictory claims of privacy violations—they violate the confounding beliefs of their users of being in control of their environmentally adapted behaviour and thus stripped of their actions geared towards contextualised status.

The challenge then is to identify what exactly it is that constitutes potential gains or losses in status. It might be access to a service that only few can use, every early-adopter knows what I’m talking about here, but this exclusivity can be applied to other fields as well. In the conversations I had at #a2n I tried to think about situations through which music could regain its status effects. The most promising I could think of would be early access to albums, as those who are engaged in music still use to get a kick out of having early access to new tunes.

I haven’t yet quite figured out how the concept of status could help in the energy industry, the industry I happen to work in. Although I admire the work OPower is doing with their social feedback, I feel they’re still only scratching at the surface of what might be possible with clever social interaction design.

Additionally, I’m still quite a bit uneasy with this whole thing. It seems too easy. So if you could point out the obvious failings this thought must have, I’d be thankful.