Social media plays a key role in maintaining inequalities between high-and low-status people by reducing complex relationships to visual displays of quantity and quality. As we have seen, while the values of engineering and geek culture play into what is considered high status, so does the attention one garners within most popular social media sites, which often rank users based on how large an audience they can command. Technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs encourage status-seeking behaviors that blur the lines between work and play and promote the infiltration of marketing and advertising techniques into relationships and social behavior. The emphasis on metrics, which track attention and visibility, shows how significant these values are in the Web 2.0 scene.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 205