{"id":42886,"date":"2011-12-16T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2011-12-16T17:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=42886"},"modified":"2017-06-24T18:11:06","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T23:11:06","slug":"a-hipster-by-any-other-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/12\/16\/a-hipster-by-any-other-name\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hipster By Any Other Name"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at The Hipster Effect<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I know, I know \u2013 you hate hipsters. Maybe somebody called you one once, but they were clearly mixing you up with the\u00a0real<\/em> hipsters. You know the ones.<\/p>\n

Hipsters have beards. Or mustaches. Or neither. They wear skinny jeans. Or maybe they don\u2019t. They\u2019ve got thick-rimmed glasses. Or sometimes not. You may not be able to describe one offhand, but you know one when you see one. Right?<\/p>\n

As elusive as a unicorn yet as common as an ant, the hipster seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. The only definite thing about a hipster is that nobody wants to be called one (yet pretty much all of us are guilty of having called\u00a0other<\/em> people hipsters). It\u2019s become one of the worst insults you can bestow upon somebody (yet it\u2019s also among the most common). If you want to completely discount a person and everything that they stand for, just break out the H-word and watch their credibility to go down the drain. Once you\u2019ve been dubbed a hipster, you yourself become meaningless in that context.\u00a0 You become one of\u00a0those people<\/em> and we all know what\u00a0those people<\/em> are like.<\/p>\n

Or do we?<\/p>\n

The definition of a \u201chipster\u201d is at best a collection of vague cultural artifacts that we associate with a certain set of personality traits, very few of which actually exist in tandem. The prototypical hipster is a trust-fund baby who spends his days talking about art projects that he never gets around to starting. He drinks the cheapest beer available even though he can afford better. He does this ironically, and he wears his clothes in the same way. He judges you, the non-hipster, based solely on your appearance, quickly dismissing you as a non-member of the hip elite. He listens to bands you\u2019ve never heard of and thinks it\u2019s sad that you can\u2019t keep up with his cooler-than-cool musical tastes.\u00a0In short, the prototypical hipster is an asshole \u2013 but for the most part, he doesn\u2019t even exist.<\/p>\n

In a way, we\u2019ve vilified the hipster archetype as a way of dealing with our own insecurities. Being cool was something most people never worried about once they graduated high school. Our internet-fueled society has since changed that, bringing the hunt for the newest and most interesting things into our day-to-day lives. There is a burden to be cool that now follows you into your 20s and 30s and beyond, whereas before these things were safely relegated to lunchtime cafeterias and high school auditoriums. And with the internet now spitting out a different concept of cool with each and every day that goes by, it\u2019s almost impossible to keep up. Eventually we throw up our hands in exasperation and, whenever we see somebody who looks like they\u2019re trying harder than us, we spit out the word:\u00a0hipster<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Sophy Bot is the author of the forthcoming book, The Hipster Effect: How the Rising Tide of Individuality is Changing Everything We Know about Life, Work and the Pursuit of Happiness<\/em>. \u00a0Bot also runs The Hipster Effect<\/a> blog, examining how identity, society and work have metamorphosed in the age of perpetual connectivity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at The Hipster Effect. I know, I know \u2013 you hate hipsters. Maybe somebody called you one once, but they were clearly mixing you up with the\u00a0real hipsters. You know the ones. Hipsters have beards. Or mustaches. Or neither. They wear skinny jeans. Or maybe they don\u2019t. They\u2019ve got thick-rimmed glasses. Or sometimes not. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,229,15,283],"class_list":["post-42886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-consumption","tag-culture","tag-prejudicediscrimination"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42886"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70374,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42886\/revisions\/70374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}