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Media explanation can be so authoritative that even the subjects of the reporting often seek to conform to its exaggerations—a process Tom Wolfe called “media ricochet.”
the majority of media industry workers were born into a higher-status habitus or gained ample cultural capital during education. This results in a shared sensibility, one skeptical of brash New Money conspicuous consumption, middle-class parochialism, and lower-class “bad taste.”
The personal status concerns of media publications result in an underreporting of popular conventions within lower-status circles.
Status competition within the media world also incentivizes reporters to hunt for the most distinctive evaluations—i.e., the “hottest takes.” Scoops, exclusives, and early discoveries are necessary to stand out.
This sometimes results in the creation of false trends—excitement about marginal or imaginary social movements.
This is all to say that kitsch may better reflect the average taste of culture at any time, but the media, in controlling the narrative of the zeitgeist, can redirect attention to nonpopular things.
once information about innovations passes through broadcasting channels, early adopters are ready to join in.
After media broadcasting, trends reach a new stage of the fashion cycle: the mid-status emulation of high-status behaviors, and subsequent high-status abandonment.
In Everett Rogers’s diffusion model, semi-high-status individuals are known as early adopters. They tend to be members of the professional and creative classes, as these groups are heavy media consumers and learn about elite conventions before other groups.
Moreover, they’re cosmopolitan—aware of many alternative conventions and comfortable with breaking traditions. Most important, they signal through taste, which creates a responsibility to keep up with trends.
Early adopters’ pursuit of the status value embodied in elite conventions thus creates a trickle-down flow of cultural practices.
Diffusion speeds up as costs come down, but the lingering cachet of ownership, not just practical benefits, is what excites many adopters.
As subcultural capital grew in importance for creative-class signaling, high-status groups began to embrace formerly low-status conventions.
But we shouldn’t confuse the diversification of cultural capital as true trickle-up cultural flows. Elite tastemakers have always stolen ideas from tiers far below, because they can “slum it” without being mistaken for people living in slums.
For trends that spread across the entirety of society, adoption itself is less effective as a high-status signal than the timing of adoption. Elites adopt early, non-elites adopt later. As the indie rock cliché goes, “I used to like that band.”
Abandonment is thus as important as adoption in fashion cycles. But abandonment requires another round of adoption.
When early adopters rush in to emulate elite conventions, elites abandon. But with the new wave of adopters creating so much excitement in the commercial marketplace, there arises an obvious economic incentive to further commercialize the trend.
Manuals are anathema to art in societies where creativity is based in the radical negation of established conventions. But that’s The Manual’s point: pop songs aren’t works of art. They are formulaic kitsch conforming to a preestablished set of “golden rules.”
these two groups may sit next to each other in Rogers’s diffusion curve, but there is an enormous gulf between them in terms of taste. As predicted by their status positions, early adopters have sophisticated and cosmopolitan tastes, and they have more confidence to try new things. Low-status early majorities are conservative and wary of breaking conventions in public.
Companies find it difficult to profit in unstable and unpredictable cultural markets and, as a way to minimize risk, they converge upon a production logic—tacit rules that shape the content and form of artworks, styles, and products in order to increase chances of mainstream consumer adoption.
While production logic is often understood as a consequence of capitalism, status directs how it plays out—namely, the fact that early majority consumers seek products that won’t upset established conventions.
Some companies have enough cachet to start their own trends from scratch, but, on the whole, borrowed innovations are more desirable than homegrown ideas.
Companies thus look at innovators and early adopters as an R&D lab, sweeping in to imitate whatever appears to be gaining momentum.
When innovations are retooled to cross the early adopter/early majority divide, they may retain only a passing resemblance to the original. But it is important that manufacturers sell it as the same entity.
The number of audience-friendly songs that could be hits is nearly infinite, but only a few will achieve the broad distribution required for success.
This begins with physical distribution—getting the actual goods into stores or otherwise ready for purchase. Companies must win over distribution gatekeepers, who are even more conservative and risk-averse.
There is also the distribution of information—i.e., publicity. As we saw with mass media, potential adopters need to know something exists. The importance of publicity is borne out by the questionable efforts companies take to capture the distribution channels.
Advertising is a key form of publicity, especially for winning over early adopters. Ads employ seductive imagery and language in an attempt to imbue goods with higher status value.
But this isn’t a one-way system: to be successful in the first place, companies must make goods that cater to the status needs of customers. Production logic simplifies innovations not just to reduce manufacturing costs but also to better match existing conventions.
These changes are necessary for any costly or symbolically difficult convention to win over less affluent and more conservative early majorities. For widespread diffusion, signaling costs need to be very low—especially social risks.
Publicity and physical distribution also help achieve the repetition required to build common knowledge. Repeated observations are powerful for inducing new behaviors—what psychologists call the mere exposure effect.
This analysis, however, often misses an important factor. Exposure works best for legitimized innovations.
At this point in the diffusion process, the primary motivation for adoption flips from distinction for high status to imitation for normal status.
Widespread adoption, however, depletes any lingering cachet. Mass-culture conventions signal normal status and nothing more. But the shedding of distinctiveness brings new advantages. All popular trends have a guarantee of low risk thanks to social proof.
Mass culture also gains new strength through network effects. The more people participate in a convention, the more useful it will be for interacting and communicating with others.
When innovations attain normalization, they reach critical mass, which Everett Rogers describes as “the point at which enough individuals in a system have adopted an innovation so that the innovation’s further rate of adoption becomes self-sustaining.”
Much of mass culture involves partial adoption, where majorities take up only a portion of the original innovation.
In the cases where majority adopters decide to directly engage with elitist conventions, especially artworks, they are often dissatisfied.
Once an innovation becomes dominant in society, Rogers’s final group, laggards, also adopt—but they do so passively.
Laggards tend to have very low status. (Even the designation “laggard” is pejorative.) As individuals they are always out of sync with culture, which suggests a lack of social capital, a meager media diet, and, in some cases, a disregard for basic social norms.
The embrace of laggards kills trends dead, and this marks the end of the diffusion process.
While most conventions rely on cachet as a fuel to reach escape velocity in the diffusion process, not all elite behaviors influence mass culture, and not all mass culture starts as elite conventions.
High-status conventions that appeal only to early adopters remain part of elitist culture, often resented by majorities toward the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
At the same time, conventions that start among low-status audiences and stay there—the long-running and popular TV show Hee Haw, for example—achieve the scale of mass culture, but are often ignored within the public dialogue.
Fashion is a never-ending process of “chase and flight.” Low-status individuals chase high-status individuals by imitating their conventions, which forces elites to flee to new ones.
We can always give up, but to compete requires continual running. This is why fashion is so often cast as the opposite—or even the enemy—of progress.
Fashion, writes Jean Baudrillard, “restores cultural inequality and social discrimination, establishing it under the pretense of abolishing it.”
In dynamic capitalist societies, fashion sells itself as a potential means for status improvement when, in fact, it works to just legitimize the current structure.
“nothing proves the originality and inventiveness of subcultural music and style more than its eventual ‘mainstreaming.’ ” For all the elite complaints about fashion, it justifies their exalted position.
The acquisition of status symbols may fool others in the short term, but constant consumption resembles a form of addiction: we believe luxury goods are a cure for our status desires, only to realize we must buy ever more.
