CHAPTER THREE:

Hipsterism

Hipsters and the practice of irony[i]

One more characteristic of the lifestyle of emerging adults is the ironic nature of their speech and behaviour.  Irony has been defined as the incongruity between appearance and reality, or between intention and achievement.   One will not often find emerging adults speak unambiguously or behave in a manner that clearly reveals their intention.  They cannot afford to.  We live in a culture that is saturated by advertising.  Wherever we go, someone is trying to sell us a product or a service and the truth or falsehood of what is shown, said or done is incidental to its purpose of trying to sell us something.  In such a climate one can no longer say heartfelt, sincere things outright because all genuine utterance will inevitably be stolen and repeated as sound bites in advertising.  For this reason I have added a separate section on the life style of hipsters because they best illustrate an ironic way of living.[ii]

Hipsters form a relatively small sub-group of emerging young adults in North America. They are worthy of note because they both resemble and deviate from mainstream emerging young adult culture. They may also serve as a comparison group and as another illustration of life as a remix process.  Hipsters tend to congregate in major North American cosmopolitan centers that formerly were ethnic neighbourhoods but which, because of gentrification have by and large lost their ethnic character. They can be distinguished from other twenty-something young people by their peculiar fashion, behaviour, interests and attitudes.

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[i] See  http://en.wikipedia.org/Postmodern_literature, p. 5 ff. and Prickett S. cited  above.

[ii] The description of hipsterism draws on a wide variety of sources:

Books:

Laham, Robert  2003, The Hipster handbook.  Anchor Books.

Greif, M. Ross, K. & D. Torrorici  2010 What was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation.

Articles/blogs on the net:

Haddow, D.  “Hipsters, the Dead End of Western Civilization”, Adbusters Magazine.

Cracked.com:  Articles on Hipsters

“On Hipsterism”: I was a freight train (author unknown)

Video/film:

Scott  Pilgrim vs. the World

Flight of the Conchords (comedy)

Magazine:

Vice, founder: Gavin McInnis, called “the Godfather of Hipsterdom”

4.     Collaboration

In distinction from previous generations emerging adults promote and practice collaboration rather than competition wherever they can.   Whether at work, with their friends or in their family, they want their views to be heard and they are most willing to give the views of others a sympathetic hearing.  When faced with a problem they tend to consult with others in the conviction that the more people contribute their ideas about solving the problem the better the solution. 

Take for example the way they purchase an item for sale.  Before they decide to buy it they research this product thoroughly from every possible angle, its price, the reputation of the company which manufactures or sells the desired item, they compare it with alternatives on the market, and they contact the company to see whether it is willing to customize the item to suit their specific need.  But having done all that they will not make the purchase without seeking the advice of their peers and they are more likely to buy an item if their friends have already bought it and found it to meet with their satisfaction.  Emerging adults are less likely to be influenced by the way a product is advertised and rely most often on their peers for deciding to make the purchase.  In this way buying a product is a collaborative process for them.     

At work they are eager to contribute their ideas to the running of the company they work for.  They are most productive when working together with other employees in groups.  They welcome rather than fear the critique of their ideas by other workers and they favour solutions to problems that are the product of collaboration.  To them work is best done as teamwork rather than individually.  Decision making, they feel should be democratic, done from the bottom up rather than from the top down.  This preference often leads to friction with the philosophy of the management in corporations that are hierarchically structured, as most of them tend to be.

They learn best in schools where education is interactive.  They get along with parents more easily in egalitarian families where rules of behaviour are the product of discussions in which they have a say.  They have no problem living at home even after they have been away to university, provided they can access the net at will without supervision in the privacy of their own bedroom.  Ironically, the Internet enables them to stay in touch with other family members while they are away.  But also, because computer technology has created a physical distance in their home between them and their parents and siblings, there is less actual communication happening.

Much of their interaction with their peers occurs on line rather than face to face.  With them they share in a community, in which they can be themselves together with others.  Within this community communication is world wide and instantaneous.  In it tradition and privacy are of lesser value; personal expression, openness and novelty are at a premium.  Since they are aiming to inform rather than impress one another the language of discourse is easygoing, colloquial, concrete and about the most mundane events of their lives.  The whole of it has the flavour of neighbours talking across the fence with one another at the end of the day.  Emerging adults find this virtual reality so much more user friendly than their everyday reality and this may be the primary reason why they spend so much of their time on line.

3.  The democratization of culture

What is happening in this process, I think, is nothing less than the democratization of culture, or the ongoing creative innovation of existing art and the seemingly never ending revision of current knowledge.  Computer technology has made it possible for emerging adults not only to access an unprecedented wealth of music and film.  It also enables them to utilize these ancient and contemporary art forms as material for their own artistic productions.  They listen to songs, read the lyrics and watch film clips.  But they also cut and paste these elements of existing culture, combine them innovatively into their own creative video (re)productions and post them on YouTube.

In addition and by means of twitter and blogging, they participate with other twenty-something adults in an ongoing and spirited dialogue on a vast array of topics ranging from religion to recreation, fashion styles to food preferences, exercise to environmental concerns. In this debate no one opinion is ever elevated to the level of gospel truth.  What matters most to these young people is the free exchange of ideas and the right of each individual to speak and be heard.  As with the arts, this development represents a democratization of knowledge.

This historical turn of events delivers the death knell to the notion of single authorship.  In a climate where everyone is allowed to be the author or composer of her/his own creation, the idea of an original composer or author who has the sole copyright for his/her production becomes problematic.  The debate of the so called “creative commons” about the right of anyone to download existing cultural products free of charge is an example of the current actuality of this issue.

2.  Remix

It may seem far fetched to draw a causal connection between the nature of digital information and the behaviour of individuals using it, but consider the following quotation from Wikipedia about Postmodernism, (bearing in mind that emerging adults are post-modern to the core.): Postmodernism represents 

a shift into hyper reality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus of many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. (emphasis added)[i]

Emerging adults do not just passively absorb this type of information but they actively evaluate it and customize or personalize it to suit their own lives.  They typically take individual bits and pieces of what they learn on the net and recombine them into their own constructions of a message for their life.  This is paradoxically simultaneously an act of independence on their part with respect to this information and an act of obedience to the demands of this information.  The very act of remixing the bits and pieces of what they learn into an organized whole subjectively experienced and produced by the users of digital information may be an act of independence ironically necessitated by the fragmented nature of digitalized information.

The end products of this evaluation and reconstruction remix process are opinions or statements of preference by emerging adults, who then communicate their opinions via the net by means of text messages, blogs or tweets to other emerging adults.  These in turn repeat the process for themselves.  They evaluate the information, choose and remix elements of it into a construction of their own, etc.  As a social process these activities are at least partially governed by the character of the digitalized information, the influence of which is so prevalent among emerging adults.

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[i] This quotation was taken from an article on irony,

http://en.wikipedia.org/Postmodern_literature, p.8.

1.  Digital

Emerging young adults were born and grew up immersed in information technology.  They are said to be the “most informed generation” of all times.  Throughout their young lives they were “bathed in bits and bytes of information”.   But what is the nature of this “information”? 

It is “digital” information, i.e. it is virtual reality rather than (the immediate experience of) everyday reality.  What we experience when we access computer information is a certain form of information, information that is digitally shaped by the medium that delivers it.  It invites us to make a statement of opinion or preference with respect to the specific information that is offered.   Digital information is information that is inherently open to evaluation and appropriation as a response.

More concretely, this type of information is like a gigantic dictionary or encyclopedia, which provides knowledge on any conceivable topic.  Like an encyclopedia it provides the user with a multitude of largely unverified facts.  For that reason it looks more like a compendium of opinions than data, each of which may or may not conflict with other opinions.  The sheer volume of digital information requires specific cognitive skills such as skimming, scanning, scrolling, surfing, sorting, categorizing and creatively tinkering with this information.  For all these reasons digital information presents the user with a collection of stand alone bits of knowledge, and, because of its fragmented nature, invites one to combine and re-combine these items into ever more innovative configurations.  In short, computerized digital information is tailor made for remixing its components into a changeable collage of style and preference.  The whole of this activity takes on the quality of a game.  In comparison with everyday experience, and regardless of how one attempts to process digital information, it is at best a facsimile of everyday experience. It is hard to escape the sense that this type of knowledge is inherently artificial.  

CHAPTER TWO:

EMERGING ADULTHOOD:

A remix generation in a digital world[i]

As in the chapter before, this chapter contains a series of items characterizing emerging adult life but this time specifically focused on the digital, remix, democratic and collaborative nature of the life style of twenty-something youths.

The influence of digitalized information currently available by means of a wide variety of computing devices is far more pervasive among emerging adults than among any other age group, with the possible exception of teenagers.  Emerging adults have whole-heartedly embraced all things digital and are in many ways the more tech savvy generation.  This is a major factor distinguishing them from previous generations. 

Their enthusiasm for all things digital is evident from their consumption habits.  More than any other age group they are in possession of all the necessary digital tools for surfing the net and texting their friends.  Typically they are also in hot pursuit of the latest digital communication gadgets such as iPhones and iPads offered on the market.  Their enthusiasm further shows in the way they respond to the computerized digital information that they access by means of these tools and gadgets.  They have by and large bought into the pull of this type of information and are allowing it to significantly influence the structure and the direction of their everyday lives.  In attempting to solve their problems of living they do not turn to books on science, philosophy, or religion for guidance, but to the net for advice.   They google their way through life.   They spend a large amount of their time surfing the net and texting their findings to one another.   They practically live in this virtual world. What may be the reason for this historically new phenomenon?

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[i] Much of the material in this section is based on a book by Don Tapscott, who has written extensively on the impact of the information technology.

           

Tapscott, D. 2009 Grown Up Digital. Toronto: McGraw-Hill.

For more on the remix culture see:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Remix_Culture, which article on p.1, gives the following definition:

Remix culture describes the way in which youth culture today more visibly orients itself around creating media by extracting component pieces from other people’s media creations, then connecting them together to form something new….

(original source: http://www.lingualgamers.com/thesis)

Also see:

Heath J. & A. Potter 2004 The Rebel Sell. Toronto: Harper Perennial.

and

Coupland, D. 2007 Jpod. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

10.  Emerging adults and their parents

Parents of emerging adults find the views and behaviour of their children more than a bit puzzling and quite different from their lives when they were growing up.  “Trying to understand our twenty-something son or daughter,” they might say, “is much like immigrating to a strange country.  We neither know our children’s language nor their customs.”[i]  On the surface there seems to be a disconnect between the previous generation and the current one.

Yet the relationship between today’s emerging adults and their parents is surprisingly close and relatively free from conflict.  There is much that these children admire about the life style of their parents, such as their work ethic and their willingness to sacrifice.  Their parents also continue to support them financially during their twenties, especially when they cannot fully pay their own way because they are still in school. 

At the same time many parents have concerns about their emerging adult children.   They want to know whether their children will adopt their values and their life style, accept their worldview, follow in their footsteps and especially when this is going to happen, if ever.  In view of the slow pace of emerging adulthood they are impatiently hoping for their sons or daughters to grow up soon and to become like them.  Beyond that, it is troubling for many parents to watch their children’s lives go in a direction that is quite different from their own.  However, it appears that most parents keep these worries to themselves and that they generally give their children a great deal of latitude in shaping their own destiny.

In assessing the validity of the concerns these parents have about their semi-adult children it should be borne in mind that descriptions by one generation of another generation are of necessity always self-involved.  The concerns parents have about their emerging adult children are not just based on an objective view of their children’s lives.  Those concerns are in part determined by the way these parents experience their own lives. 

As for the way today’s emerging adults view their parents, they may disagree with elements in their parents’ life style, but most of them see no need to openly voice their criticisms.  They are generally quite tolerant of the difference in outlook on life between them and their parents and they largely have chosen to just quietly go their own way.  All this entails, however, that there is very little dialogue between today’s emerging adults and their parents about life’s most fundamental issues and this in turn adds to the homelessness these twenty-something young people feel. 

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[i] To my knowledge, Margaret Mead in her book Culture and Commitment was the first to describe the generation gap as parents and their children living in different countries.  She ascribed this phenomenon to overly rapid historical-cultural change in our society.  This powerful metaphor is still relevant for describing the disconnect between today’s emerging adults and their parents.