Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change, by W. David Marx, Viking Press, September 2022.
Everyone has the need to ensure their social status. This universal dynamic mechanism builds our behavior, forms our taste, determines our lifestyle, and ultimately shapes us. So we can use status to explain why some things become “cool,” how style innovation comes about, and why trends such as clothing, music, food, sports, slang, travel, hairstyles, etc. are constantly changing. In this book, the author explores how the pursuit of individual status has created our cultural ecosystem from multiple perspectives such as history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, , economics, etc. The author discusses three basic questions: Why can individuals gain profound meaning from some seemingly ordinary behaviors? How do unique styles, conventions and feelings come about? Why do we change some behaviors over time, but some behaviors continue to exist? The answers to these questions provide a new perspective for understanding contemporary Internet culture. (Produced by the "Thought Workshop" of the Social Science Newspaper's integrated media, please see the Social Science Newspaper and its official website)
