The attempt to analyze the hipster provokes such universal anxiety because it calls everyone’s bluff. And hipsters aren’t the only ones unnerved. Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. Of course this is a terrible lie. And Bourdieu devoted his life to exposing it. Those who read him in effect become responsible to him — forced to admit a failure to examine our own lives, down to the seeming trivialities of clothes and distinction that, as Bourdieu revealed, also structure our world.

At the center of this personal laboratory is the mobile phone. During the years that personal-data systems were making their rapid technical progress, many people started entering small reports about their lives into a phone. Sharing became the term for the quick post to a social network: a status update to Facebook, a reading list on Goodreads, a location on Dopplr, Web tags to Delicious, songs to Last.fm, your breakfast menu on Twitter. “People got used to sharing,” says David Lammers-Meis, who leads the design work on the fitness-tracking products at Garmin. “The more they want to share, the more they want to have something to share.” Personal data are ideally suited to a social life of sharing. You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.

While it's fun to ponder which future trends Getty's seers are banking on, it can also be illuminating to learn which sorts of images have been most attractive to their clients in the recent past. Getty's Web site gets more than 3 million unique users each month, all scouring it for purchasable content. Getty gave me lists of the most popular search terms on their database for 2006, 2007, and the first half of 2008. Only three entries showed up in the top 10 on all three lists: business, people, and woman. (Woman climbed from eighth to fifth to first, which Waggoner attributes to the increasing global presence of women in the workplace and thus the increasing global demand for photos and video depicting women in the workplace.)

“There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

[...] For example, interest-driven genres of participation tend to have a more geeky identity associated with them, involve congregating on specialized and often esoteric interests, and reaching beyond given, local school networks of friends. This is a whole package of things that goes together, a recognizable genre for how youth participate in online culture and social life. We also think of hanging out, messing around, and geeking out as genres of participation. [...]

We are social creatures who must interact for mutual benefit, and — the negative version — who harbor grudges when we feel we’ve been treated unfairly. Without a sense of fairness and also a level of trust, without a system of reciprocal altruism and tit-for-tat — one good turn deserves another, and so does one bad turn — no one would ever lend anything, as there would be no expectation of being paid back. And people would lie, cheat and steal with abandon, as there would be no punishments for such behavior.

"We are living at a moment when the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end."

"When New Yorkers see a stranger, they don't think, 'I don't know you.' They think, 'I know you. I know your problems—they're the same as mine—and furthermore we have the same handbag.' So that's how they treat you."

“It’s what we call implicit egotism. We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.”

"Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?"

"He somehow knew we were all struggling with the same things. Whenever I watch a Hughes film now, I remember the euphoria of being 13 and falling in love with movies."

"All the dialogue is made up. The worst thing you can do is try to go around like a sociologist and record a glossary of slang. It's so mobile, it changes by the time you get it in print, it's so outdated it's embarrassing, so I just make up my own."

"It therefore makes biological sense for people to prefer beautiful friends and lovers, since the first will make good allies, and the second, good mates."

"Social capital depends on belonging to a church, which in turn depends on acting like a mensch." Got religion?

"[T]he site is popular largely because it enables us to indulge our gazes anonymously. [...] If our ability to privately search is ever jeopardized, Facebook will turn into a ghost town."

"With a little help from mtvU, both Gladwell in (sic) Kenna were able to drop in a UPENN Sociology class and give students a little personal perspective on their homework."

"Geoffrey Miller is a man with a theory [...] His idea is that the human brain is the anthropoid equivalent of the peacock's tail. In other words, it is an organ designed to attract the opposite sex."

"Our data suggest that such resistance is not because white Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt, or ethically flawed. White Americans suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a black American."

"The main finding of this research is that people with a tendency toward reactance may nonconsciously and quite unintentionally act in a counterproductive manner simply because they are trying to resist someone else's encroachment on their freedom."

"Rationally, you should not feel responsible at all for the outcome of the Super Bowl. But the more people perceived themselves as having thought about the game, the more they thought themselves responsible for the game's outcome."

“The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone. [...] the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlook that we should."

"Social network sites are not digital spaces disconnected from other social venues — it is a modeling of one aspect of participants’ social worlds and that model is evaluated in other social contexts."

"People have a great deal of curiosity. Where can you find Yankees fans? Do they just fall around that one city?"

"We look to kids to call it like it is. That's why adults find watching them so freeing, especially in tense, controlled times like these. Their bad behavior is cathartic for us. Better than Xanax

"Traditionally, athletes were not necessarily fashion-forward. But these days with the increased amount of money made by athletes and sports as an entertainment commodity, they are now helping to set trends."