Greglas is right — Bourdieu can explain all of this. The rich will always have the “right” membership in the “right” clubs not because they are psychic, but because they themselves determine what the “right” club is. This is the changing face of economic domination, as exhibited through material goods.

“Elite” networks will always change, just as “elite” luxury goods always change. Carry a Louis Vuitton bag with all those logos? How declasse. How gauche. Everyone knows the “right” bag doesn’t show off its logo. It is the same with social networks.

James: Many thanks for the clarification.

Greg: I like the point about software architectures that allow users to perform many different roles–are they really liberating? The rise of “gated communities” in cyberspace leads me to cast a slightly skeptical eye on an insistence on autonomy in presenting the self.

Perhaps just as no person is a hero to his or her valet, the leveling pressure to present one coherent self in cyberspace helps consolidate the multiple selves we develop to deal with increasing levels of inequality and social fragmentation. I don’t like the idea of a “cyberspace class transvestite” jetsetting with pals from “aSmallWorld” while “keeping it real” on MySpace. As Thomas Frank suggests in Commodify Your Dissent, that type of “chameleoning” works to disguise and reinforce class divisions, not to bridge them.

On the other hand, perhaps the pressure to consolidate a self on some dominant social networking platform will intensify the artificiality of presented personalities. As Alessandra Stanley noted today in a sharp column on the “Classless Utopia of Reality TV,” many “principals [of reality TV], whose romances and kitchen quarrels furnish plotlines, are not really actors, but neither are they ordinary people exactly; they are a new hybrid of semiprofessional personalities who play themselves on camera.” But that may not be a bad thing–just a reminder of the limits of the online self.

In any event, both are probably wrong. Tilly and Odlyzko provide a convincing argument that value increases as n log n. Their argument is compatible with Zipf’s Law, and thus with lots of Long Tail arguments.