Virtual Social Climbing

摘要

It used to be that simply owning a modem qualified you as a person poised on the cutting edge. No matter that the most of the discretionary discussions on the Net a decade or so ago were the stuff of technical manuals and nerd joke books and that, with the low-speed modems of the day, the text scrolled across your screen at the pace of the O. J. Simpson trial. You were on the newest frontier, a bold experiment where all humans were regarded without prejudice and preconception. On the Net, you would be judged by your words alone; petty trappings of the material world were to be left at the desktop. This egalitarianism seemed too good to last, and it didn't. Today, just as other ills of the so-called "meat world" have found their way to cyberspace, a status consciousness has come to the Net.