My olive oil is uncool, apparently. Welcome to the world of microsnobbery | Emma Beddington

Social media has supposedly ramped up our impulse to judge each other on the most trivial grounds – but is this really a new thing, asks Emma Beddington

‘Are we living in an “era of microsnobberies”? Writing in the Washington Post last week, the lifestyle influencer Victoria Wolff asserted that we are, claiming that the fragmentation of American taste facilitated by, and expressed through, social media had created a new phenomenon of “hundreds of tribes” judging each other on highly specific sets of status signifiers.

Wolff cited a few – “your children’s lunch boxes, whether your roses are native and if your olive oil has a story” – that left me feeling like a grubby little peasant with my narratively inadequate oil, but also relieved not to live in Amagansett in the Hamptons, as she does. It sounds like a Nancy Meyers meets Edith Wharton hellscape. Indeed, I was reminded of reading earlier this year about the tiny-batch $80 (£60) fruit pies you’re supposed to bring as a “hostess gift” in those parts (etiquette specialists advise Hobnobs remain an acceptable hostess gift in the eastern suburbs of York).

I’m not convinced microsnobberies are new. If anything, when communities were more insular and less connected, surely the sets of rules they established were even more exacting and specific, the markers of difference in social status even more microscopic?

I’ve just read Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat, which paints “narcissistic and neurotic” belle époque Paris as a bitchy hotbed of microsnobberies, with incestuous social circles writing about trivial transgressions in place of today’s Substacks and Instagram posts. I bet even in the most austere 12th-century contemplative order, some unhappy monk was silently judging a novice’s “not quite us” stockings. It’s human nature, not a product of internet social atomisation – the impulse to judge each other, and feel judged, on minutiae is eternal.

The only real escape I ever found was in living abroad. During 12 years in Brussels, I internalised the broad-brush macrosnobberies – the “right” areas; the (vital) hierarchy of chocolatiers; the holiday destinations of the most chic neighbours – but remained happily oblivious if I was introducing myself gauchely or buying beyond-the-pale condiments. Man, it was mentally restful and I miss it – I could be tempted to move somewhere new just to be blissfully socially clueless again.

• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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