Fashion, it has been said, is a cycle of emergence, emulation, saturation, collapse, and rediscovery. So how did the so-called “hipster” movement—a title no hipster would ever cop to—become just another sad set of self-reinforcing uniforms and clichéd behaviors?
Two theories:
The Acceleration of Cultural and Iconographic Blending Created by the Internet
When simple collage has taken a backseat to digital chopping, dropping, mashing, and churning, the apparent inevitable final result is a grey sludge rather than the artful mélange we hoped for, and all bets are off. With every color in the crayon box stuffed into their hands, and every cultural visual reference at their fingertips, anything is permissible to the adherents of this movement because nothing means much of anything, and the standard class-based uniforms tend to re-emerge, co-opting the shell of whatever current trend can be wrapped around marketers’ products and dumped back into the marketplace.
And since now there are no safe choices, the safest choice is obvious failure—the “can’t fail because I’m trying so hard to fail” look. When nothing is left but irony, when you’re purposefully trying to look like shit, it’s not hard to succeed. Choosing the most garish selections from a spectrum of fashion modalities and juxtaposing them for maximum vomitous effect isn’t really that difficult at all.
Oscillating Fashion Universe
With youth encouraged to constantly obsess with themselves and their youthfulness, the candle flame of “now” burns up trends just as time burns up our memories. Simply put, perhaps this was a fashion movement just like any other, based in socio-economic and sexual jockeying, and a display of resources (or in this case, display of how meaningless the resources are when one is a “successful” urban first-worlder). Like any popular—or pop—movement or fashion trend, adoption and abandonment by influential groups of these trends drive the adoption and eventual abandonment by less influential (or perhaps, more easily influenced) groups.
So when did the hipster movement reach its apogee and become a self-parodying costume affair? 2008? 2006? So take off the damn keffiyeh already; you’re going to embarrass your kid at her lacrosse game.
There have been a number of amorphous and shifting perceptions about who is using emerging social media platforms such as Twitter and how—such as "teens don't tweet," or that twitter is populated primarily and almost exclusively by educated whites.
While many of these weak suppositions have been proven baseless, the perception still exists among many in our industry that African-Americans are late and slow adopters of social media and of mobile technology in particular. A number of recent studies have hard data that refutes this; in fact, "African-Americans are now the most active users of the mobile web, and their use is growing at a faster pace than mobile internet use among white or Hispanic adults," according to the 2010 Pew Internet & American Life Project.
A recent article in Slate entitled "How Black People Use Twitter" offers some real insights into how African-Americans are using these new platforms while unfortunately relying on the simplistic cognitive bias pointed out by Scott Poulson-Bryant, that these behaviors somehow are representative of the "Black Twitter Experience"—which even the original article takes pains to address near its summary. The Slate article focuses on the use of "blacktags" or hashtags that rely on a particular construction and demonstrate a certain viral element that can sometimes make the hashtags reach trending status on Twitter.
While this is certainly one major characteristic that seems to be popular among African-American users of Twitter, is it certainly not exclusive to them, nor is it a definitive differentiator between any supposed racial profiles of users.
As we all know, the internet's cloak of anonymity has allowed people to become online what they could not be in the real world, and Twitter is no exception to this—while many in our industry rely on Twitter to connect with their colleagues and peers using their real names and faces, there are most certainly those on Twitter who are not who they claim to be, using this network's anonymity to engage with subgroups outside their own that they could not otherwise in real (offline) life.
If you want to know what a particular subgroup thinks, how they relate to one another, what they talk about, and where they congregate, the best way to achieve this is to become a member of one of these subgroups. Until the internet, this was impossible. Now, we can all be atheist grandmothers who love ice hockey, if we want to be.
Is it unethical to do this? is it wrong to become someone else, outside your socioeconomic group, outside your culture, outside your race or even sex? If you're selling something, attempting to manipulate, propagating hate, of course it's wrong. But, if you're searching for real and objective insights...
I'm not suggesting invisible anthropology here, nor that anyone should actively deceive; rather, that the internet provides us with an opportunity we have never had before to erase walls and to experience belonging within a group that would otherwise not accept us, or find acceptance from us, in the real world. Acceptance is powerful, and subgroup behaviors, mores, and trends can only be learned by living them, even if only digitally.
If you want to know how subgroups of people are using platforms like Twitter, then become that atheist grandmother who loves ice hockey, meet other atheist grandmothers who love ice hockey, and dedicate yourself to maintaining this identity for several months; like all relationships, they develop over time and the insights you glean from the experience will as well.
The social media really is social—meaning it is people that make these networks, and only technology that connects them. Living online within these subgroups will likely not yield hard data that can be extrapolated into servicable sets, and so it should be; it is the subtle nuances of culture that we gain from this experience that allows us to create more understanding between subgroups, and learn how to connect with people who are different, or maybe not really so different, from us after all. Of course, you never know who you're really talking with either, do you...
"The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
The nature of collaboration is unchanging, while the tools we use to facilitate collaboration are in flux. For every new channel we create, as a result of the inescapable and delicious flaws of human beings, a new wall springs up in hearts and minds. Only ideas can knock down these walls and unlock these new doors. Ideas are bigger, more powerful, and more dangerous than bombs, more insidious than narcotics, even more seductive than lips. Only ideas, dexterous with culture, subversive, and shameless, can reach through the filters that technology encourages humans to create in order to block out the noise and ugly clutter of 21st century existence.
Copywriters and art directors have been paired together for decades now, in a time-tested, safe little fraternity of creativity. The process of their collaboration has undergone many changes thanks to the advance of technology, but the issues they face—reaching synergy, equity in decision making, hitting deadlines—remain the same as they were half a century ago.
And no matter whether it's lovefest or daily war these relationships yield in the process of creation, we often find this pairing to consist of one hedgehog and one fox. While all accomplished creatives are capable of seeing problems and solutions from varying perspectives, there is often a singular vision (the hedgehog) capable of taking any color in the swatch book that focuses the energy of the other who has a thousand brilliant little ideas (the fox). True, these types often clash. But in our industry, foxes cannot exist without hedgehogs, and hedgehogs are lost without foxes.
Collaboration is often the product of talented people following an organic process to reach shared and tangible goals. But talent and character, perfected processes, and even experience cannot create the environment for great thinking that finding the proper balance between your foxes and your hedgehogs will. Multiple perspectives, shaped by a unifying vision, and touched by both the left and right hand and brain, create the best work. The most daring and effective work is generated when the right fox is paired with the right hedgehog, even if that means they may occasionally fight with knives.
While this pairing remains religion at many agencies, now copywriter and art director are joined by many others with "interactive" in their titles, as well as programmers, producers, and animators who contribute more from the very beginning rather than simply help color within the lines produced for them at the end of the process. But no matter how this group is structured, success will depend on more than talent, experience, and commitment to the work; effective collaboration requires the ability to blend many perspectives into a singular vision, one that finally yields that dangerous, insidious, and undeniably effective idea that breaks down walls and demands to be embraced, remembered, and shared.
Comically Vintage offers daily digs from our print past. Whether you like it or not.
Those were the days of New Mutants and roses...
It is certain, and evident to our feeds, that on the web content is flowing. Now whatever content flows there has been put in motion by another, for content is nothing else than the reduction of something from pre-cogitated and nascent thought into formalized and transmitted idea. Therefore, whatever content flows on the web must be kept in motion by creators and co-creators, editors, curators, and collagists.
And this can go on ad infinitum, though not all participants are of these categories: Witness the unfollowed follower, who uses Twitter as a micro-tuned à la carte selection of inbound channels, and communicates in return nothing but their consumption habits to those who are in the position to collect such data.
Are these consumers really consuming “social media”? Are they sharing with others, with a large group, a small intimate one, or sharing nothing at all? Given the opportunity, these unfollowed followers only consume based on their unique tastes and interests, just as they likely would consume television programming by the channel in its present form if the opportunity to consume it on an à la carte basis was available.
Not everyone wants to use the social media in a “social” way—traditional, passive consumption motivations and behaviors are being replicated in the digital world. The difference between social content generators and content consumers is the difference between the social media and the personal media: the social media relies on equality in broadcasting (created by the internet and related publishing technologies) and relationships (though the definition of this has become very wide), while the personal media is simply the total, but totally personalized, experience of content flows on the web, regardless of our participation in the development of that content.
The personal media is fine-tuned and filtered, and yet still unwalled, still flexible, and still open to exploration.
