Will Wilkinson is both a friend and a colleague, so it will surprise no one that I find Will's perspective on status competition to be congenial. I also wholeheartedly agree with Shirky's take on the subject. It requires little imagination to think of status hierarchies whose "implicit meta-ranking" are completely unclear. Will's comparison of Chief Justice Roberts with Peyton Manning is a great example.

What I think lends Farrell's claim of "implicit meta-rankings" some plausibility is the fact that, until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status. In 1970, whoever appeared on national television and in national magazines on a regular basis was a celebrity by definition. And because there were only three television networks and a dozen or so national magazines, the top end of the status hierarchy really was close to zero-sum. If you appeared on Johnny Carson, you displaced somebody else.

But as the Internet removes the artificial scarcity of soapboxes, it is becoming increasingly implausible to suggest that everyone's fighting for a spot on a fixed national pecking order. Case in point: I just got back home from a road trip with my fiancée, and she brought along her iPod stocked with knitting podcasts. I wasn't aware of it until recently, but there is, apparently, a vibrant online community devoted to swapping knitting tips, complete with its own blogs, forums, podcasts, and minor celebrities. I'm sure there were a few famous authors in 1970 who wrote about knitting, but the national conversation around knitting is incomparably larger and more participatory than it was in 1970. The rise of an online knitting subculture has created a whole new status hierarchy for knitting enthusiasts to compete over.

This example could be multiplied by thousands of other communities of interest that have sprung up on the web. And I don't think it makes much sense to suggest that the top knitting bloggers are competing with, say, the top linguistics bloggers, for status. For knitters, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee is a bigger deal than Mark Liberman. For linguistics enthusiasts, the reverse is true. And of course the vast majority of people have never heard of either of them. This seems weird if you're used to the centralizing tendencies of 20th-century media technologies, but as the Internet makes it easier for people to find others with shared interests, there's simply no reason to think there's a limit to the number of communities that can exist, or the number of people who can find satisfaction from being prominent members of them.