The internet has facilitated the decentralized production of content that can be easily distributed to a networked audience. The possibility of one's blog, online videos, or digital pictures reaching millions of people worldwide was impossible before the World Wide Web, and its potential today means that attention and visibility are highly valued, because larger audiences translate into more influence and more recognition. One's audience, too, can be easily quantified due to the metrics built into most social media that measure readers or followers, which provide a way, however clunky, to compare people to each other that does not require an understanding of their subtle personal interactions. Metrics are thus used not only to measure a website's success, traffic, or profitability, but also as a way of determining personal status. Megan McCarthy explains: "A lot of people around here are engineers, they're not very good with subtleties and cues and the numbers are easy … Numbers don't change on you."

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 245