If a Blackberry signifies (or signified) middle-to-senior-manager status, then it's a high-status signal for a minion and a low-status signal for the big-company CEO.
Flip the sign :-) What status does the lack of a Blackberry signify?
It signifies a set of possible statuses; more precisely, either the presence or the absence of a Blackberry actually signifies something more like a probability distribution over statuses. (More precisely still, they're likelihoods rather than probabilities, and needn't sum to 1.) The absence-of-Blackberry distribution is like a notch filter; learning that someone doesn't have one makes it (or did, a few years back) much less likely that someone occupies the middle-to-senior-manager niche.
This (I take it this is your point) can produce more counterintuitiv...
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