The desirability of gaze needs to be considered but also I think the dynamics. Being habitually gazed at is qualitatively different from being gazed at when one isn't used to it. Likewise, being gazed at in a different way from what one is used to.

Personally, I think a distinction between gaze and stare is needed. Or perhaps a distinction between an exhibit and an object that one wishes connection with (or not?)

When I was 18 I had my lower jaw shortened considerably to reduce my overbite, which changed not just my looks but also my ability to speak fluently (the ess sound having previously been impossible to create). Prior to that I always felt that I was stared at to some extent as an exhibit. Yet afterward, this didn't feel like it changed and overtime I've come to the realisation that this was largely an internal construction which has (almost) faded away over the past almost 2 decades. It wasn't entirely negative – I think it helped develop in me a model of myself as exceptional which has remained fairly ingrained.

All this has left me a bit ambivalent about the gaze. I know my own gaze is fairly direct and some people find it unsettling.

Getting back to the idea of capital: I like Bourdieu's conceptions of the different types of capital and their interrelatedness which I sense you are channeling a little with the bit about identity capital, etc. Now, are the gaze getters the only ones who are gaining? Perhaps the giver of the gaze gains by not having their gaze spurned? (A win-win perhaps? If I let my training as an economist loose I'd probably start on about game theory here and speculate on the social prohibition against staring being a sub-optimal Nash equilibrium in a Prisoners' Dilemma type game). The length of the gaze offers its own possibilities: perhaps a stare could be defined as a gaze extended too long in time, thus offering an in-group vs out-group marker that serves to demarcate a social group, ie the in-group can gaze longer than the out-group before it is noted as a stare and 'invites' a negative reaction.

(Note to myself: I must read Mulvey's work – all the above is written in complete ignorance of it.)

Enjoy (I must also reread Proust along these lines – especially Within A Budding Grove for the whole Gilberte infatuation and The Guermantes Way for the interaction of identity and social capital in his insinuation into the lives of the Guermantes family).

It would be nice to see a post on the Economics of Anthropology!

Miata drivers will (sometimes) flip up their lights – the pre-99 models could pop the headlamps up and down, without turning the lights on – sort of blinking at each other. These, I guess, are the gazes of acknowledgment and recognition…

Over at This Blog Sits At The an interesting discussion about the economics of the gaze. All of which puts me in mind of a useful cross cultural example, that of darshan or darsan. Literally meaning seeing, view or vision,…

My first trip to Japan was filled with challenges to gaze defaults – did I meet the eyes of oncoming pedestrians? What was appropriate culturally? And what was appropriate culturally given that I was a gaijin? And when I walked down the street and heard English, why did I have the urge to say "hey! I speak English too!" or give the "nod" to a fellow whitey walkin' down the street. (The "nod" was something I discovered when I began riding – I mean motorcycles – even though I had an already out-of-date Honda Elite scooter and NOT a 'cycle – I still got the "nod" from grizzled guys on Harleys and fat old men on tri-wheeled geezer-carts)…and as my time changed the foreign EVERYTHING reaction began to settle, my own feelings about myself as invisible began to shift slightly.

As with a lot of those things, I don't think I ever came to any resolution, but it was just fun to have all these "normal" behaviors brought to the surface and challenged.

Nicolas Nova defines it:

you earn whuffie as people credit you out of respect, gratitude, pity, lust, love, or any other motive for popularity. Problems:
First, whuffie is undifferentiated. Respect ain't cash. Depending on the context, my having accrued whuffie for accomplishment at badminton shouldn't translate into whuffie for neurosurgical accomplishment.

Second, respect is barely transitive. I respect A, and A respects B, so I may respect B by association. But only so far. Add a few degrees, and the referral is useless.

Third, mutual respect is respect squared. I care if people I know and respect and love reciprocate. Whuffie from strangers matters less to me.

Fourth, I take pride that some people hate me. Know me by enemies. I'd rather have modest respect from those I respect in turn, than modest respect from a much larger crowd.

There's another blog that explores topics in reputation currency, Whuffie

Then there's Shirky's blog index, here's the first article

http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.