Tag Archives: hipster

The Rise of Beards and the Fall of Social Media

January 25, 2017 Mike

Perhaps the rise of the hipster beard, handle-bar mustache, oversized glasses, craft brew, fixie (fixed-gear bicycle), thrift store sweaters, indie folk and pickling is a sign. Some see it as a signal of the imminent demise of social media, no less.

Can the length of facial hair or jacket elbow pads and the end of Facebook be correlated? I doubt it, but it’s worth pondering. Though, like John Biggs over a TechCrunch I do believe that the technology pendulum will eventually swing back towards more guarded privacy — if only as the next generation strikes back at the unguarded, frivolous, over-the-top public sharing of its parents.

Then, we can only hope for the demise of the hipster trend.

From TechCrunch:

After the early, exciting expository years of the Internet – the Age of Jennicam where the web was supposed to act as confessional and stage – things changed swiftly. This new medium was a revelation, a gift of freedom that we all took for granted. Want to post rants against the government? Press publish on Blogspot. Want to yell at the world? Aggregate and comment upon some online news. Want to meet people with similar interests or kinks? There was a site for you although you probably had to hunt it down.

The way we shared deep feelings on the Internet grew out of its first written stage into other more interactive forms. It passed through chatrooms, Chatroulette, and photo sharing. It passed through YouTube and Indie gaming. It planted a long, clammy kiss on Tumblr where it will probably remain for a long time. But that was for the professional exhibitionists. Today the most confessional “static” writing you’ll find on a web page is the occasional Medium post about beating adversity through meditation and Apple Watch apps and we have hidden our human foibles behind dank memes and chatbots. Where could the average person, the civilian, go to share their deepest feelings of love, anger, and fear?

Social media.

…

But an important change is coming to social media. We are learning that all of our thoughts aren’t welcome, especially by social media company investors. We are also learning that social media companies are a business. This means conversation is encouraged as long as it runs the gamut from mundane to vicious but stops at the overtly sexual or violent. Early in its life-cycle Pinterest made a big stink about actively banning porn while Instagram essentially allowed all sorts of exposition as long as it was monetizable and censored. Facebook still actively polices its photographs for even the hint of sexuality as an artist named Justyna Kiesielewicz recently discovered. She posted a staid nude and wanted to run it as an targeted advertisement. Facebook mistakenly ran the ad for a while, grabbing $50 before it banned the image. In short the latest incarnation of the expository impulse is truncated and sites like Facebook and Twitter welcome most hate groups but most draw the line at underboobs.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Google Search and all hipsters.

Idea Soup

Perchance Art Thou Smitten by Dapper Hipsters? Verily Methinks

December 23, 2015 Mike

As the (mostly) unidirectional tide of cultural influence flows from the U.S to the United Kingdom, the English mother tongue is becoming increasingly (and distressingly, I might add) populated by Americanisms: trash instead of rubbish, fries not chips, deplane instead of disembark, shopping cart instead of trolley, bangs rather than fringe, period instead of full stop. And there’s more: 24/7, heads-up, left-field, normalcy, a savings of, deliverable, the ask, winningest.

All, might I say, utterly cringeworthy.

Yet, there may be a slight glimmer of hope, and all courtesy of the hipster generation. Hipsters, you see, crave an authentic, artisanal experience — think goat cheese and bespoke hats — that also seems to embrace language. So, in 2015, compared with a mere decade earlier, you’re more likely to hear some of the following words, which would normally be more attributable to an archaic, even Shakespearean, era:

perchance, mayhaps, parlor, amidst, amongst, whilst, unbeknownst, thou, thee, ere, hath

I’m all for it. My only hope now, is that these words will flow against the tide and into the U.S. to repair some of the previous linguistic deforestation. Methinks I’ll put some of these to immediate, good use.

From the Independent:

Hipsters are famous for their love of all things old-fashioned: 19th Century beards, pickle-making, Amish outerwear, naming their kids Clementine or Atticus. Now, they may be excavating archaic language, too.

As Chi Luu points out at JSTOR Daily — the blog of a database of academic journals, what could be more hipster than that? — old-timey words like bespoke, peruse, smitten and dapper appear to be creeping back into the lexicon.

This data comes from Google’s Ngram viewer, which charts the frequencies of words appearing in printed sources between 1800 and 2012.

Google’s Ngram shows that lots of archaic words appear to be resurfacing — including gems like perchance, mayhaps and parlor.

The same trend is visible for words like amongst, amidst, whilst and unbeknownst, which are are archaic forms of among, amid, while and unknown.

Read the story in its entirety here.

Image courtesy of Google’s Ngram viewer / Independent.

Idea Soup

Your Perfect Lifestyle Captured, Shared, Commoditized

November 9, 2015 Mike

Many millions of people post countless images on a daily basis of their perfect soft-focus and sepia-toned lives on Instagram (and other social media). These images are cataloged and captioned and shared so that many more millions may participate vicariously in these wonderfully perfect moments.

Recently a well known personality joined the Instagram picture-posting, image-sharing frenzy. Not unlike movie-stars, sports personalities and the music glitterati she’s garnered millions of followers on Instagram. She posts pictures of her latest, perfect outfits with perfect hair; she shows us perfect lattes sipped from the perfect coffee shop; she shares shares soft-focus sunsets from perfect mountaintops; images of a perfect 5-course dinner from a perfectly expensive bistro with or without that perfect bearded date; photographs of perfect vacations at the beach or from a yacht or a vintage train. She seems to have a perfect life, captured in a kaleidoscopic torrent of perfect visuals.

Her name is Barbie. Actually, her full name is Socality Barbie. She’s a parody of her human followers, and she’s well on her way to becoming the next social media sensation. Except, she’s not real, she’s a Barbie doll. But what’s really interesting about Socality Barbie is that she’s much like many of her human peers on social media — she’s a commoditized hipster.

My one complaint: she doesn’t take enough selfies. I wonder what’s next for her — perhaps an eponymous reality TV show.

From the Guardian:

Here she is on the sand, barefoot in the lapping waves, wearing cropped skinny jeans and shoulder-robing a blanket. And here she is in a cafe, the sleeves of her utility overshirt pushed up as she reaches for her flat white with its photogenic foam-art. Here she is in the mountains, wearing a beanie hat that perfectly offsets hair blow-dried into soft waves. Oh, and look, here’s a still-life shot of her weekend-away capsule wardrobe laid out on hardwood floors. She’s taking high-heeled hiking boots. But then, she is a Barbie doll.

Socality Barbie, the newest social-media sensation, is on a mission to take down Instagram from the inside. The account is the brainchild of an anonymous wedding photographer in Oregon, who dresses a Barbie doll in mini-hipster outfits and posts Instagram shots of doll-sized hikes (always sunny, lots of photogenic light shafts through the trees), coffee dates (whitewashed wooden tables and a calm, mindful atmosphere) and boyfriends (check shirt, facial hair).

It’s not exactly satire – I don’t think you can really satirise Instagram, that would be like satirising kittens – but Socality Barbie skewers something about how plastic Instagram has become. She is the Rosa Parks of a society oppressed by thigh gaps and tyrannised by heavily filtered brunches. She is a taking a brave stand against – OK, poking fun at – the disproportionate power and influence of Instagram, which has overtaken the Farrow & Ball paint chart as the sacred text we must live by.

Let me get one thing straight: I love Instagram. I am addicted. Sometimes I wake up in the night and, half asleep, reach for my phone and start scrolling through my feed, which at that hour is Lily-Rose Depp in novelty socks, people I vaguely know in New York taking overlit selfies in bars and insomniacs on a 3am camera-roll jag posting throwback photos with mawkish captions. And I love it. So I am absolutely not about to declare Instagram over. Anyway, that would be idiotic: in 2012, Facebook paid $1bn to buy it; it is now valued at $35bn. And in fashion, Instagram is everything. It has catwalk shows in real time, street style from all over the world, plus you get to see every time someone you know buys a new coat. What more could I possibly want?

But what Instagram isn’t any more is cutting edge. Instead of being hip, it is a world of commodified hipsterdom. All pigeon-toed loafers on pretty tiled floors and nail art on a hand holding a street-truck burger. It is a guilty pleasure, a cosy comforting world where everyone dresses really well and is also, like, super nice. It is is a bit like watching reality TV, in fact. You get to watch attractive people living their lives, at a level of apparent intimacy that makes it compelling. Theoretically, Instagram is more high-minded than reality TV, because it shows you a kaleidoscope of viewpoints from all over the world. The trouble is they all look the same.

Read the entire story here.

Images courtesy of Socality Barbie.