Status
Definition
"The relative social position of an individual. For instance, student, teacher, child, and parent are easily identifiable statuses in most cultures. Each of us has a number of different statuses. We usually acquire new ones and lose old ones as we go through life." See Role.[1]
Online, status is also what you currently are in a group: active, passive, online, offline.
Two Senses of the Word
The entry above contains a genuine ambiguity that is worth making explicit, because the two meanings have converged online.
In the anthropological sense, following Ralph Linton's classic distinction, a status is a position in a social structure and a role is the behaviour expected of whoever occupies it. Statuses may be ascribed (assigned at birth or involuntarily — age, kinship, caste) or achieved (entered through action — profession, marital state, rank). Everyone holds many simultaneously, and which one is operative depends on situation; the set of them is a person's status set, and conflicts between them are among the most reliable sources of social difficulty.
In the computational sense, status is a state variable a system publishes about an entity: online, away, busy, idle, last seen, typing, delivered, read. This sense arrives from instant messaging and presence protocols, not from anthropology.
Convergence
The two senses have merged because networked systems now assign social position by publishing state. A follower count, a badge, a verification mark, a karma score, a contribution graph, a leaderboard position and a "top contributor" label are all machine-computed statuses in the anthropological sense: they are positions in a structure, they carry expectations about behaviour, and they can be gained and lost. What is new is that they are calculated continuously, displayed automatically, and comparable across strangers.
This has several consequences. Achieved status becomes measurable and therefore optimisable, which produces the whole family of behaviours around gaming metrics. Ascribed status becomes partly assignable by platform decision rather than by birth — account age, verification, algorithmic reach. And status becomes portable in some respects and stranded in others: a reputation built on one platform is generally worth nothing on another, which is a form of future runoff applied to social position.
Presence as Status
The narrower sense — active, passive, online, offline — deserves separate attention because it is a status that a person occupies without doing anything. Presence indicators publish availability continuously and without consent in any meaningful sense, and they generate obligations: a green dot is read as a claim about responsiveness, and its absence as an explanation. Much of the manipulation people perform around messaging systems — disabling read receipts, appearing offline, waiting before replying — is management of an ascribed status they did not choose to have.
Calm Technology
Status is also the natural content of calm technology. A system that continuously reports the state of a thing — a network, a queue, a machine, a person's availability — in a form that can be perceived peripherally is doing exactly what calm technology asks: informing without demanding attention. The design question is which states are worth publishing, and to whom.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Dennis O'Neil, "Glossary of Terms," Cultural Anthropology Tutorials, Palomar College. Originally at http://anthro.palomar.edu/tutorials/cglossary.htm — the tutorials were retired and this URL no longer resolves.
