Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by W. David Marx

Bestsellers such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Jonah Berger’s Contagious have suggested that cultural trends play out like “social contagions”—with ideas spreading from person to person in an exponential pattern until the entire population is “infected.” This framing, however, tends to disregard human agency. We choose to adopt and abandon, and make these decisions based on status value. But there is a bigger issue with the viral metaphor: the measles remains the measles as it spreads through a population, but cultural innovations change significantly on their path to becoming mass culture. Chocolate could not become ubiquitous until it took the form of mass-manufactured, easily packaged, and affordable solid milk chocolate. The simplification arising from the participation of mass media and mass production changes the nature of all conventions over time.