Ha-ha, Ah-ha and Oh-yeah: cultural irony and rediscovery

A lot of the cultural items we consume or partake of – hairstyles, shoes, tv shows, slang, professed values, bands, etc. – can be thought of as socially instrumental. That is, they can have a “symbolic value” over and above their use value, entertainment value or whatever. We often consume them not only because of what they do, but because of what we hope they add to our social identity in the eyes of those we esteem and those we despise, to our in-group and our out-group.

A while ago, I wrote a post illustrating part of this (intuitive? clichéd?) idea. I tried to show how the mutual interactions and reactions of three distinct cultural subgroups – trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes – can drive cultural items through their life cycle. This idea has occurred to a lot of us: many social groups’ preferences (for shoes, bands, styles, slang, etc.) respond – positively or negatively – to other groups’ preferences. Slang and cadence, for example, are often valuable signals and affirmations of group affiliation, so preferences for specific slang terms change rapidly with diffusion outside the group. We illustrated this as interwoven curves along the path from few partaking (o) to most everybody doing it (n).


But so far we haven’t really discussed the later part of a cultural item’s life cycle, the point after c in the graph. Frequently, cultural items just go away and are never heard from again. But sometimes they come back around. In this post I want to look at some late stage possibilities for trends, particularly cultural irony – imbuing cultural items with a different, more "self-aware" symbolic value than they originally had – and rediscovery – rehabilitating older cultural items for current use.

Irony and Rediscovery

First of all, some items never really go through the creep from fringe to mainstream. Agreed. The idea here isn’t to model the essential, inviolable profile of a trend. Rather, it’s just that in most collections of people presented with a cultural choice you can roughly define different subgroups by how their preferences change relative to others’ preferences. For example, within the regular joes there are likely to be different constituencies analogous to trendsetters and hipsters. That is, some regular joes will be a lot like hipsters in their preferences – ready to partake of items not quite fully mainstream. If we restrict n to regular joes, the preference profiles of the different types within this group might look something like our graph.

Anyway, cultural items that never go through the full cycle at the highest, all sub-groups cultural level – that take off in or are specific to one sub-group only – become particularly interesting when we consider irony.

Ironic embrace is cultural consumption that’s generally very aware of the consumed item’s cultural history. This awareness often becomes an explicit part of its new symbolic value. Consider the recent ironic rehabilitation of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rick Astley and ‘90s pop (Bell, Biv, DeVoe is suddenly on every hipster playlist). Faint nostalgia notwithstanding, most of the consumption of this stuff (like 70s and 80s ironic embrace before it) seems to be ironic.

Grossly simplifying, there are two big possibilities for ironic embrace. The first is when one sub-group appropriates a cultural item from another group after the latter has already abandoned it.

When this happens, we often get what I call ha-ha irony. An example – also illustrating my advanced age – might help. At a “noise” show back in the very early ‘90s (noise became fleetingly cool when “alternative” was mainstreamed by bands like Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction) the headliner’s lead screamer wore a New Kids On The Block t-shirt. At this point, NKOTB’s popularity had dried up even among their teen target. The contrast between a defunct teeny-bop group and the aggressive, self-consciously oppositional posturing of noise music was obviously the ironic point. This is a case of ha-ha irony. It’s just a broad joke or gag and in no way even remotely critical. In fact it even has the prototypical joke structure: an unexpected shift in reference or clash of expectations results in humor.

Obviously, this isn’t a full-blown new trend arising out of an old one. Rather it’s a cultural item that typifies the prefab pop trend previously popular among the mainstream appropriated for new symbolic purposes by a self-consciously opposed sub-group. Bearing this in mind, it could be graphed something like this:


This time we start at c, the point on the original graph where the item peaks for the regular joes, and proceed to n. After n the item starts to become a cultural liability for regular joes and the total population partaking plummets to m, which is much less than n. Now the trendsetters can claim the cultural item for ha-ha ironic purposes. The trendsetters, of course, will start to abandon if the hipsters pick it up at a’, that is, when the hipsters come to see it as a codified ironic strategy (see). But this case probably wouldn’t get past a’. (Although, an ironic mini-trend did occur in the early ‘90s when noise acts started appropriating the insipid graphics of those new-agey “Smooth Sounds” whale-song albums.)

The NKOTB case involves an item that never went through the full cycle from trendsetters to regular joes. Or rather, it’s an item that the hipsters at the noise show most likely never invested in. NKOTB more or less started out with the regular joes. My guess is that this is often the case with ha-ha irony: the items that get ironically rehabilitated by one sub-group tend to be yanked off the junk heap of another subgroup. In this case, it was the hipsters using teeny-bop detritus to highlight their aggressively oppositional stance to pop music. It was a joke that everybody – even the regular joes once into NKOTB– would get. As a sort of rule, we could say the greater the item’s one time value to a subgroup, the greater its potential to be used in a ha-ha ironic way by members of a self-consciously oppositional group.

The second possibility for ironic embrace is when one group ironically appropriates a cultural item from another while the latter group is still into it.

Not surprisingly, we usually get ha-ha irony here, too. Consider some clever hip-kids’ “love” of geeky sci-fi/fantasy conventions, like Dragoncon in Atlanta, Georgia where middle-aged IT professionals (that’s actually unfair... young IT pros dig it too) party all night in DIY Klingon armor. These fringe affairs are really, really popular among die-hard fans and represent for them a market for a very specific sort of symbolic capital. For the hip-kids, on the other hand, it’s a lark, a gag, a chance to ogle the arcane rituals of nerd-communion in their proper environs. The hip-kids’ intended audience – the group from whom they seek recognition of the value of attendance – is their buddies, not the group actually attending the convention. Also, the hip-kids' symbolic value comes from a completely different cultural and symbolic arena than it does for the earnest fan-boys.

It’s sort of like cultural poaching for laughs. Once a few ironic trendsetters start doing it, the very next year will see hipsters joining in. We can graph this second ironic configuration like this:



Under certain circumstances, this sort of value relationship can result in what I call ah-ha irony (as opposed to jokey ha-ha irony). We can illustrate ah-ha irony with a slight alteration of the noise band example. Suppose it had been a Nirvana shirt instead of NKOTB. At the time, Nirvana was wickedly popular and symbolized the mainstreaming tendency that allowed noise bands to arise as an oppositional alternative in the cultural marketplace. Nirvana had gone through the full cycle from trendsetter popularity on the periphery to mainstream pop adoration among the regular joes. Wearing a Nirvana shirt – the incarnation of the new ‘90s pop which many hipster fans viewed as a sort of personal cultural theft – would have been a really critical, really exclusionary (in the sense of in-group/out-group defining) statement that few would have gotten. After all, most of the kids at the show had been – or still were – into Nirvana. That ambiguity of intention is sort of the calling card of “good” or at least powerful irony: it should be sneaky or at least not intelligible to all and have some sort of critical quality.

What seems to distinguish these cases of ha-ha and ah-ha irony is closeness to the cultural item. In the ha-ha irony cases, the kids who were being ironic probably hadn’t been part of any of the groups involved in the item’s trend cycle. They were outsiders who could objectify the cultural item. However, in the ah-ha case, it’s trendsetters using something that most hipsters (and they themselves) had recently invested in as an ironic prop.

It’s probably not anything like a rule, but this specific example of ah-ha irony looks something like this:


The item went through the whole curve; the trendsetters and hipsters had been committed to it at one time. Needless to say, ah-ha irony is really rare (or maybe not and I just don’t get it). It’s usually used solely by fine artists, motivated by chronic self-awareness and cultural inferiority complexes, which drive them to theoretical, unaesthetic excesses. I know because I was one... probably still am.

Let’s look finally at “rediscovery,” earnest and ironic. Sometimes cultural items come back from the dead. Sometimes the folks doing the reviving are earnest (the Nick Drake revival about 12 years ago and the garage rock revival about 4-5 years ago). Sometimes they’re ironic (disco’s many revivals and Enoch Light). But most of the time, it’s a mix of both (the ‘80s synth-pop sound, particularly in contemporary French and West Coast alterna-pop) and it’s always with different intentions than when the item was actually culturally current.


This graph, like the irony graphs, starts at c and goes through the crash at n. After n there’s a period of cultural hibernation while all of the groups assume their original relative positions. At some point, the item gets picked up by the self-conscious cultural adventurers (earnest indie rockers for Nick Drake, the gay community for at least a couple of the disco revivals) and the cycle starts again.

So why is rediscovery sometimes earnest and sometimes ironic? Well, I think part of it might have to do with uptake among past cultural groups and the perceived genealogy of contemporary cultural groups. Contemporary groups that understand themselves as having “descended” somehow from traditionally oppositional subcultures often approach items from these “related” subcultures earnestly and items from “unrelated” or mainstream culture ironically. Regular joes, since they’re not quite as culturally sensitized or obsessively self-aware as trendsetters and hipsters, generally shoot for ha-ha irony unless the item has already gotten past b’. In that case, it’s no longer really “rediscovery”: the item has been “contemporized” or brought back into currency. (Regular joes that still dig the music they loved in high school – “it’s not about new or old...Aerosmith just made quality rock, man!” – aren’t rediscovering anything... they’re just frozen in a particular cultural period.)

A Last Note

But this whole graph-y, representational thing I have going skirts one obvious and over-talked point about contemporary culture: it seems to be moving faster. The trend circuit from hip to passé to rediscovery is getting quicker and quicker. So much quicker that the whole concept of rediscovery makes less and less sense every day. Something similar is happening to the idea of mainstream; it doesn’t really seem to have the old, easy to poke at stodginess it used to. Actually, it’s pretty hard to even locate in the first place. Why is this happening?

Just speculating here, but pervasive media probably helps. Modern user-tailored, user-driven media like the web is really good at getting stuff from the fringe to the center, from “hip” to “mainstream,” overnight. Stuff that used to take years to bubble to the surface through old media channels now zips up almost instantly in a process of accelerated mainstreaming that calls into question the whole idea of fringe and center, counterculture and mainstream.

But in the west at least we still seem to highly value the idea of oppositional individualism and the autonomy of our choices, of trendsetters, “mavericks” and nonconformists, out there marching to the beat of a different, etc. A significant number of folks in the west – most I’d say – have internalized this cultural value or ideal. Trendsetters and hipsters probably wouldn’t be our culture’s marketing holy grail otherwise.

You put these together – media that rapidly drains oppositional cultural positions of their “outsider,” “in the know” status and an internalized cultural admiration of the “individualist” or the “nonconformist” – and you get accelerating trend cycles. After all, if cultural items come larded with a symbolic value that is partially determined by the item’s prevalence, and modern media provide a fat but highly user-responsive channel to spread the word, then you’ll have to act quickly to stay relevant. In this environment, uptake and abandonment of trends is going to speed up.

Adding to the mix cultural industries like film and fashion, that, to a certain extent, have institutionalized in their marketing and business models ideas of constant opposition, innovation or nonconformity, and things really get moving. Taking just one example, the fashion industry is built on the idea of annual overthrow, of mainstreaming (i.e. making passé) last year’s line so this year’s can supplant it. It’s a business model founded on the idea of the incessantly new. Fashion marketing hinges on – and thus amplifies – the desire to be slightly ahead of the curve, to break with the currently mainstream fashion, to be more distinct and “original” (in acceptably fashionable ways) than your peers. In the present media context of almost instant diffusion and accelerated mainstreaming, their business model of providing “the new” and their marketing model of codifying, amplifying and creating a “need” for “the latest,” results in accelerating demand that outstrips their creative capacity. The result: unrepentant cultural recycling at a faster and faster pace.

Why Does Fad = Bad? Velocity, Autonomy and Constancy

It’s a fact that trends end, but most accounts of the uptake of cultural artifacts don’t really get into the end too much. They focus on the dynamics in regards to acceptance or consumption, not really touching on how these very same dynamics can lead to the cultural item being very quickly dropped. Trends, after all, are only as stable as people’s beliefs about other people’s preferences and expectations.

Which brings us to fads. Fads can be thought of as cultural trends – tastes, styles, fashions, attitudes, jargon, slang, etc. – that peak rapidly and then quickly die out. We’re all familiar with these: a cultural item – consider those annoying rubber wrist bands from a couple of years ago – suddenly shoots up in prevalence, appearing everywhere at once, and then suddenly pops back out of sight. So, fads by definition are trends that end quickly, but speed of uptake is obviously a key signal. In this post we’ll look at two different accounts of the relation of speed to ends and how our evaluation of fads differs from our evaluation of other trends. Finally, we’ll try to figure out what is “symbolically” at stake in the distinction between a trend and a fad and how this makes the latter automatically less worth joining.

First of all, Luis Bettencourt presents a model of the trend life cycle in which agents use a trend's relative speed of adoption as an indicator of viability and value. The faster the speed of adoption relative to other competing items, the more attractive an item is. When the speed slows, as it inevitably will given a finite population, agents will begin to abandon the trend provided the speed falls below an individually determined critical level. In this model, speed is a positive factor as it indicates the potential value, a form of “social proof,” of a trend. But it also inevitably brings about the trend’s end. Because of the way the dynamics are structured, trends that move fast, will move even faster, quickly bringing about their own crash. These are clearly fads.

Contrary to Bettencourt’s model, Jonah Berger and Gael Le Mens claim [pdf] that a high perceived rate of adoption of an “identity relevant” cultural item decreases our likelihood of adopting or consuming it. Identity relevant cultural items are those that can be thought of or used by potential consumers as a means of communicating some desirable or esteem-generating information about who they are or – more likely – who they’d like others to think they are; identity relevant cultural items are conventionally meaningful signals of group-specific tastes, social affiliation, status, etc. If adoption is too fast, the item might be a fad, which is a bad investment in the social identity stakes because, by definition, they can’t sustain popularity.

An important difference between the two views is obviously the latter’s focus on “identity.” In Bettencourt’s model, the faster the better for all items; it’s the fact that velocity is unsustainable in finite populations that leads to collapse. In Berger and Le Mens’s view, beyond a certain velocity threshold, the faster the worse, at least for publicly visible cultural items with identity implications. They argue that it’s our concern for the “symbolic value” cultural items may have for the development and maintenance of social identity that explains the desire to avoid fads. High velocity may decrease the attractiveness an item might have because it could be just a “flash in the pan” or of fleeting popularity. In other words, faddish cultural items are a bad investment as they don’t maintain symbolic value. So, in both models, speed is information, but in Berger and Le Mens’s, identity concerns decrease the item’s attractiveness (i.e. likelihood we’ll partake) as speed increases.

Their goal is to show that we judge potential faddishness by velocity and that we avoid fads because they're viewed negatively, which might be tied to the fear that they don't return symbolic value. Though they never really get into why we view fads negatively, I feel that we can say something stronger than that fads are unattractive because they’re bad social identity investments. Indeed, it seems that public association with a fad in an identity relevant domain may ultimately deliver disvalue as opposed to just decreased value. It not only won’t add to your social identity, in some situations it might actually damage your social identity. It’s often embarrassing or somehow dis-estimable to have been caught in a fad, to have publicly invested in or consumed some short-lived and now unpopular cultural item (if there are any pictures floating around the internet of you earnestly rocking a white Miami Vice blazer and woven loafers, you know what I mean).

So, I think that with a little reflection most will admit that getting publicly caught in a fad is somehow embarrassing or to be avoided, i.e. a disvalue. Can we articulate what it is about faddishness that actually bugs us? Why should the perception of an identity relevant cultural item’s faddishness make it less valuable or even potentially disvaluable? If it’s just that “flashes in the pan” – items that don’t sustain popularity/potential symbolic value – provide limited or no return to social identity on investment, why do we actually feel embarrassed about fad association as opposed to just annoyed at the wasted time? What is symbolically at stake in the distinction between fads and trends?

Autonomy and Constancy

Our social identity is impacted – often mediated – by the cultural items we consume or otherwise associate ourselves with. Cultural items have symbolic value related to what consumption of the item conventionally means or communicates. For example, the shoes you buy do more than just protect your feet or give you extra purchase on slippery sidewalks. They also communicate something about you, your tastes and often your position in a socio-cultural taxonomy (you’re a hipster in Converse or narrow slip-ons; an urban kid in puffy, tricked out Nikes; etc.). They’re public signals with conventional cultural connotations that you can exploit to manage your social identity. It’s these conventional connotations, the realm of taste and tastes, that confer the symbolic value. We manage our social identities partially by managing the set of cultural items we publicly associate ourselves with.

But clearly it’s not the cultural item alone that confers the symbolic value we exploit in managing perceptions of social identity. Perceptions of our motives and the longer term regularity of our social identity also impact our ability to wring symbolic value from a cultural item. For example, I had a friend who rapidly cycled through “personas,” going from punk to skinhead to b-boy to truck driver. With each new identity came a boatload of highly appropriate, conventionally meaningful gear, slang and comportment. But no matter how cool or dead-on they were for the current identity, he could never really wring any value from them. In fact given the suddenness of each of his transformations, they just seemed like cynical accoutrements, rendering symbolic disvalue and actually damaging his social identity to those he presumably most esteemed. The more he desperately tried to construct a "cool" or valuable social identity, the less likely it became that he actually could. Clearly, the items' perceived appropriateness or continuity with past social identity is important. More generally, perceptions of the motives for associating oneself with cultural items effect the items' symbolic value (and possibly one's larger social identity). If it seems out of character or if the social identity motive is too obvious, we likely won’t be able to garner any actual symbolic value from them no matter what they are.

So, in managing our social identities, we also have to manage perceptions of our management; there are “perceived motive” conditions on the symbolic value we get from some cultural item in an identity relevant domain. More specifically, there are autonomy and constancy conditions, which, if not met, decrease or possibly reverse the symbolic value available from a cultural item. Fads, pretty much by their nature, trash these conditions. Before saying why, let me look a little more closely at the perceived motive conditions, which must be met for an item to confer symbolic value.

Autonomy
Sometimes people try too hard to impress. They obviously speak, dress or comport themselves in what they assume relevant others consider the “cool” way. People like this are often called posers (or poseurs... but when I spell it that way I feel like one). They could be doing the same thing everybody else is doing, but their identity relevant moves are perceived as desperate, “inauthentic,” or even cynical.

As Jon Elster says, “nothing is so unimpressive as behavior designed to impress.” I think this “general axiom” extends to our public association with cultural items as well. Of course, we all recognize that our tastes are shaped by our in-group and larger culture. If not for the conventions and norms against which we evaluate cultural items and social identity, “symbolic value” really wouldn’t exist. But when identity relevant choices appear unduly concerned with others’ perceptions they start to lose value and may even damage social identity. When it appears that you’re dressing or talking a certain way solely out of concern for others’ perceptions of you, you may seem, for example, pretentious, conformist or cynical as opposed to cool. In short, in the West at least, we disvalue identity relevant moves that appear to be completely externally or cynically motivated, while we greatly value those that appear to be internally, “authentically” or autonomously motivated.

Constancy
When it comes to your social identity you don’t want to appear that you’re trying on personas. This is closely related to autonomy, but conceptually distinct. You can switch your style daily, trying to align yourself with various cultural groups, in which case you’re a poser or social butterfly. But you can also switch daily just because you’re an odd loner, a kook. In this case, you’ve high autonomy, but low constancy. They’re distinct, but either way fickleness when it comes to identity is frowned upon. If you give the impression that you’re actively searching for an identity, it’s unsettling: it feels stagey, shifty and possibly cynical.

Though research suggests that our perceptions and expectations of singular self-identity are sort of illusory – more a product of self-narration and fundamental attribution error than some continuous, thing-like Self – we clearly assume and value the idea of constancy, consistency and continuity when it comes to social identity. Pomo identity theories notwithstanding, fickleness, or publicly searching for some sort of social identity, is often interpreted as dishonest, “inauthentic,” self-defeating, cynical and sometimes even pathological. It’s probably a cultural artifact of the West, but we really like to think of ourselves and others as Selves in the ideal sense. Acting otherwise can turn social identity moves on their head, making them seem like a sham and destroying any potential value.

Why We Avoid Fads

We are socially incentivized to manage our social identity management. We seek to construct social identities that are meaningful for and align with existing socio-cultural groups. But in order to create a valuable social identity, we have to construct it in a way that gives the impression that our choices are the autonomous decisions of a constant, stable, already fully constituted social identity. Failing to give the impression of autonomy and constancy in our decisions decreases the “value” of social identity relevant moves.

Fads are culturally salient; their sudden appearance everywhere gives them high visibility and holds our focus. Because of our (probably cultural) bias toward autonomy and constancy – that is, for evaluating identity moves against the ideal of individual, reflective choice by a singular Self – we interpret these waves of uptake and failure in individual terms. After a fad crashes, our bias pushes us to interpret it negatively as a case of social influence over autonomous decision, as a case of herd mentality. The speed of the descent we interpret as social proof of the emptiness or valuelessness of the fad. But the speed of the ascent we interpret as the dis-estimable actions of non-autonomous, inconstant conformists: it’s the result of unreflective "bandwagoneers," people with no strong Selves embarrassingly misled by social influence.

Provided you want to optimize the potential symbolic value from a cultural item, you had better take into consideration whether or not it’s a fad. But, that’s not the only reason you should avoid them. Publicly associating with fads may damage your larger social identity. That is, association with a fad is interpreted as a failure of the autonomy and constancy conditions and specific failures of general conditions reflect on all of your identity relevant decisions. Publicly joining a fad changes the way others interpret your motives for all social identity relevant decisions; your motives become suspect not just in this case, but to some limited degree in all past and future cases. Provided information is publicly available, association with fads incrementally whittles away at the perceived "authenticity," "autonomy" and, effectively, "value" of your social identity. So, it’s a wise strategy to wait and see. Failing that, use the information at hand to judge the probability that some cultural item is a fad. Keep your eye on the speedometer; velocity of uptake is the most salient indicator of a fad pre-crash.

Trendsetters, Hipsters and Regular Joes: value curves and cultural trends

Luis Bettencourt suggests that trend setting and following can be thought of as a game that offers maximal benefit for those who partake of a successful trend as early as possible, ride it to its height and then bail before it loses momentum and crashes. But different people are likely to engage trends (and cultural artifacts in general) at different points in the trend’s life cycle and for different reasons. Some people self-consciously seek out novelty; others monitor the culture for the most promising up and coming trends; and still others simply follow the majority’s lead. It’s as if “communities” are comprised of sub-populations that differ in the way they evaluate trends relative to their uptake by the larger population.

Of course there are a large number of cultural factors (consumption/cultural capital; salient norms; symbolic capital and esteem; etc.) other than their fellow agents' behavior that impact people's evaluation of a trend. But for this post we want to hold those things steady and look at how the general uptake of a trend within a population impacts the trend’s attractiveness to three distinct sub-populations: trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes.

All in all it’s a system characterized by mutual interdependence, with agent’s evaluations of whether or not to join a trend strongly influenced by others’ opinions and expectations as evidenced by their actions (this includes the so-called trendsetters). With trends, it’s generally believed that the more others partake, the more valuable it is – up to a point – for the average agent to partake. For example, most people wouldn’t want to be the first person to introduce a fashion, but are willing to rock it once a significant (but not overwhelming) number of relevant others have. We can illustrate this idea with the following graph.


As the population partaking increases from 0 to n the value of partaking moves from negative to positive at point a. This is the so-called tipping point. From there it climbs until point b where saturation devalues the trend. To keep things simple, we’ll pretend that the trend eventually collapses and disappears or else becomes part of the cultural fabric – a presupposition – like wearing clothes in public in most Western cultures. In both of these cases, we’ll just say that the valuation tends to 0 as uptake approaches n. (Actually, there are several distinct possibilities for a trend’s life after point b, but those will be investigated in another post.)

That’s fine for the average cultural consumer, the regular joe, but what about people we would consider trendsetters? These people self-consciously value things few others do. Does their value curve look like this? Well, if we expressly confine n to their reference group – the people from whom they directly seek esteem and acceptance – then, yes. However, if we say n is some largish portion of the people in the trendsetter’s wider community, then, no. Trendsetters – or at least the cultural connoisseur and contrarian varieties – tend to value certain trends (and cultural artifacts generally, like bands, fashions, etc.) because they aren’t widely appreciated within their community (though they must be at least understandable within their reference group). Though many other cultural variables (consumption capital, cultural capital, etc.) come into play, the snotty urban movie store employee likes that movie you’ve never heard of partly because you’ve never heard of it.

So, those are two extremes, the regular joes and the trendsetters. The regular joes tend to hold off on positive evaluation until the expectation of general participation is high. Trendsetters on the other hand evaluate trends by more reference-group focused cultural standards (which we’ll ignore here) along with the trend’s uptake among the general public. For the little cultural caricature we’re doodling, we can say they’re pretty much opposed. As trend uptake moves toward the tipping point – point a in the graph above – it decreases in value for the trendsetter, ultimately becoming negative.

But there’s a third group worth looking at. I call this group the hipsters, but they aren’t exactly the tight-jeaned crew we associate with that word today. Some elements of the contemporary version, however, are descended from the more general hipster I’m considering here.

Hipsters aren’t trendsetters because they’re interested in finding only the winning trends. But they’re not regular joes either because they want to join prior to general uptake; they highly value joining before the tipping point. They want some of the cultural novelty, or attendant symbolic capital, of partaking of something others don’t currently but may soon value. But they also want that symbolic capital to extend beyond the trendsetter’s tightly focused reference group into the more general population. That is, they want the esteem that can be gotten from truthfully saying “I was into that before it was cool.” However, they also value novelty enough to bail on trends prior to their peak and subsequent collapse. So they value trends highest around the tipping point, but devaluation sets in shortly thereafter.

Anyway, putting all three idealized types together gives us the following graph.


The trendsetter disvalues the new and under-represented trend much less than the hipster and the regular joe, thus he starts from a point much closer to neutrality (of course, he could start from neutral or even positive). It also takes a much smaller portion of the population partaking (a couple of fellow trendsetters) for the trendsetter to positively evaluate the trend.

As the new thing catches on among the trendsetters, it approaches point a. At this point the hipsters, who have been monitoring the culture for up and coming trends, take note and the trend moves from negative to positive for them. This is a tipping point for the hipsters and it marks the beginning of devaluation for the trendsetter.

Absolute devaluation for the trendsetter occurs at point b, the tipping point for the regular joes and the point of highest value for the hipsters. The trend has nothing to offer the trendsetters anymore as it has now been officially accepted by the mainstream. The hipsters act as a bridge between the miniscule number of trendsetters and bulk of the population. Indeed, they are probably the ones that bring trends at the cultural periphery into the mainstream, giving them enough exposure to decrease their disvalue to the regular joes.

Moving from b to c, the trendsetter’s value curve declines while the regular joe’s peaks. The hipster, however, has had steadily diminishing value since the peak at b. Around c, it goes negative and only returns to neutrality as the trend is in absolute decline/disappearance on approach to n. In future posts I’ll look at a more complete model of the possibilities after c.

The most interesting thing about this model is that it paints a relatively intuitive picture of how three groups of cultural consumers/producers value trends relative to each other’s valuations. And if we squint a little, it meshes relatively well with Duncan Watts’s [pdf] contention that the most important element in a viral model isn’t necessarily the Influentials (here, the trendsetters, who are looked to by others as harbingers of hot new trends), but rather the connected subgroup of folks with low switching and adoption costs (here, the hipsters, who pick up and amplify trends that become highly valued among the trendsetters). Hipsters are seeking a broader display of cultural capital and the accumulation of symbolic capital or esteem in general and thus seek out potentially successful trends, joining early and switching often. To that end, they bring trends into the mainstream and give them enough exposure to potentially tip the regular joe’s. Without them, the trend might be noticed but not generally valued.