Transforming Pixels to Gold

I like Bourdieu. First he's got a very French sounding name that gives him instant philosophy street cred (first name is also Pierre) but that's not a good reason to like someone. A better reason is that he's said long ago that the purpose of a lot of what we do or say is to distinguish ourselves from others. We develop strange languages to isolate ourselves from other groups, while hardening the glue within our own group. We create 'secret' codes as a way to know if we're 'in' or 'out'. 

True, he talked about the privileged class trying to keep out the plebs who just don't get things like "high" art  (why wouldn't they get that when you put a urinal in a gallery, it becomes art?) but why not apply this to other tribes like kid's SMS language - what does "stsooys tbh cya wknd wb" mean and if you don't know you were probably born before Netscape was the choice browser.

So people are always going to create new spaces and new languages to distinguish themselves from everybody else and before this space reaches critical mass there's a bunch there already figuring out clever ways to get in and sell a lot of something. This is like adding more oil to the water and bound to disperse the congenial gathering fast - look at what happened to MySpace: more people on it, more marketing budget spent on it = less 'cool' / less the choice online communication platform.