Saved by Danielle Vermeer
Signaling: The Language Peacocks, Gazelles, and Humans All Speak
The answer is – you guessed it – signaling.
Julian Lehr • Banking on Status
Such behaviour can be both a warning to others and a form of social punishment.
Robin Dunbar • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
We all make linguistic decisions like this all the time. Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with the existing holders of power by talking like they do, so we can seem rich or educated or upwardly mobile. Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with particular less powerful groups, to show that we belong and to seem cool, antiauthoritarian, or
... See moreGretchen McCulloch • Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
While Path did indeed fail as a distribution provider, I would argue that keeping the network’s size small can still have benefits in line with my signaling theory: Deliberately limiting the number of people who can join a network (e.g. by charging a membership fee) creates scarcity which in turns makes the network more interesting. Network members... See more