In the last post I discussed trend uptake among trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes. In evaluating whether or not to partake of a trend, members of each group consider both their peers’ evaluations as well as the prevalence of the trend in their “community.” I just wanted to show how cultural items could be moved from the periphery to the mainstream by the mutually interdependent choices of motivationally distinct cultural sub-groups.
But that post didn’t really address what happens after the trend peaks. Most trends end, but not all end the same way. In the next post I’ll look at one class of trend ends: the ironic embrace. However, before I can do that, I need to look more closely at the contentious and much discussed subject of cultural irony itself. In particular, we’ll look at what cultural irony is commonly believed to be, what it probably really is, how it has changed and why some trendsetters reacted to the change with calls for “earnestness and authenticity.”
The Myth of Cultural Irony
Irony seems to be bound up with intention. Specifically, cultural irony is assumed to be like literary irony in that it’s the often comic tension between specifically doing or saying one thing but meaning or intending some totally different, often opposed, thing. Cultural irony is valorized in the literature as a critical strategy in the sense of being a self-conscious critique or questioning gesture. Back in the early ‘80s, Paul Fussell used irony as an identifying feature of his “Class X,” the class of urban and urbane hipsters and intellectuals who use camp and kitsch as a critical cultural tactic. Cultural irony in this sense is embrace – of bible school t-shirts, Jean-Claude Van Damme or velvet paintings – with a self-conscious commentary attached. It’s not doing what’s normal to fit in, it’s doing what’s “normal” to point out (particularly, to point out supposed tackiness, baseness or all around inanity).
But about 10 (some say 15) years ago cultural irony transformed into a fashionable style. Trendsetters and hipsters had made the strategy so visible and its cachet so great that it finally caught on among the regular joes. Effectively, ironists’ self-aware embrace of the normal as a supposed critique of the “normal” was progressively replaced with a jokey cultural caricature, more reflexive than reflective, a fashionable scare-quoting of practically everything. The trendsetter’s strategic irony was overtaken by the regular joe’s purely stylistic version which mimicked some of the tropes and techniques of the earlier critical “ironists” without actually being critical. This caused some serious hand-wringing among the old ironic trendsetters and hipsters. As a result, a few years ago many trendsetters (and then hipsters) began advocating a return to earnestness.
Frankly, I don’t completely buy the above story of valiant and true trendsetting cultural ironists robbed of a vital critical technique by non-reflective, novelty-hungry cultural gluttons. I think it’s more likely that cultural irony is an in-group norm, which defines an esteem game. Let me elaborate.
The Game of Cultural Irony
Kierkegaard apparently claims that the greatest ironists want to be misunderstood. Half true. The greatest ironists want to be misunderstood by everyone, excluding a highly qualified and estimable few. That is, for irony to be ironic it has to allow the possibility of being taken at face value, but that possibility can’t be so overwhelmingly likely that absolutely no one gets the joke. Irony no one gets isn’t really ironic while irony everyone gets isn’t very good. The art comes in creating the aesthetic tension between appearance and intention; basically, coding so that the intention is hidden enough but still apparent to the initiate.
Like Kierkegaard’s great ironists, the greatest cultural ironists want to be understood by a sufficiently small and personally esteemed circle while being misunderstood by everyone else. In my preferred terms, they want to participate in a necessarily bounded esteem game that’s played by taking the appropriate attitude to pre-existing cultural artifacts.
Research on social group formation and identification suggests that they develop arbitrary conventions to increase both in-group cohesion and out-group difference. Consider styles of dress, types of music, uniforms, etc. and the presumed attitudes that go along with them. Sometimes these conventions develop into full-blown social norms with prescriptive impact (i.e. telling you what you’re expected to do in the ought to do sense of expectation). Among other things, norms – both conventions and social norms – define evaluative structures within social groups, i.e. esteem games within which members compete for esteem and evaluate each others’ performance in terms of the group’s prevailing normative standards.
My suggestion is that cultural irony is a norm: a coordinating set of strategies (conventions) for imbuing existing cultural artifacts (bands; t-shirts; cars; music styles; silly, cause-related rubber bracelets; etc.) with new, in-group determined meanings different from those of their original context. It may start with some sort of vague critical intent, but ultimately it stabilizes as one of several possible methods a self-consciously oppositional (counter-) cultural lineage manages to coordinate on for defining and evaluating in-group behaviors, attitudes and aesthetics. More simply, cultural irony is one of the many possible mechanisms a counter-cultural group can coordinate on to produce in-group cohesion and out-group difference. It's an internally coordinating means of external dissent. But once coordinated on, it determines an esteem game, a structure within which group members can attempt to gain esteem or status using various conventional strategies for appropriating and re-deploying other groups' cultural artifacts.
This story’s not as cool as the critical outsiders version, right? I agree, but think about it: Do you really think that all or even most of the culturally ironic fashion choices of trendsetters or hipsters through the ages – from today’s hip urbanites wearing funny thrift store tees touting middle American values to art savvy sophisticates collecting velvet paintings a couple of decades ago – were enacted with the sort of individual critical awareness that that story demands? No one really believes this. More often than not, our live choices are bounded by the coordinated conventions of our in-groups and those conventions are largely about heightening out-group difference. Sometimes we may more or less intentionally choose our in-group, but once chosen our actions tend to spring – not fully intentionally – from our desire to become and stay part of that group and our conditioned, group-appropriate expectations, esteem standards, dispositions or values. After a while – even if we're esteem seekers – we don’t reflect upon social norms and conventions, we act from within them. Generally it's only when we’re confused by a situation or a norm breaks down that we reflect on its content.
Also, it seems pretty clear that trendsetters and hipsters, within their in-groups, are just as motivated by esteem as everybody else, maybe even more so. Conventions and social norms are the strategies and standards of esteem games; they determine the viable moves as well as the criteria for evaluation.
So, the majority of trendsetting cultural ironists probably are not intentionally critiquing mass culture. Rather, they're participating in a group-defined and group-defining conventional game with others in their in-group. But cultural irony is in some sense critical. However, it is most often critical only at the strategic level – the level of in-group coordination on a mechanism of out-group differentiation – not the individual level. From a distance, the actions of cultural ironists appear critical because they re-define the cultural artifacts of other groups and times in order to define themselves. Yet at the level of personal choice, these actions are most often simply fashionable or conventional moves in an esteem game. Clearly, this is where the analogy between cultural and literary irony breaks down. Literary irony is also a convention, but it’s an intentionally selected one at the individual level. Cultural irony, on the other hand, is a norm coordinating consumption of and relations to cultural artifacts that is more often than not simply enacted rather than intentionally chosen.
Odds, Ends and Earnestness
Okay, but if cultural irony is a norm why and how did it spread like a trend? And if it was always a convention (like fashions), why does today’s fashionable cultural irony seem different from yesterday’s?
First of all we just need to notice that the spread of cultural irony seems to have the same structure as the trend curves model of the last post. It moved from trendsetters to hipsters and then, in its present form, to regular joes. By the time regular joes jumped on, trendsetters began moaning about the need for a return to earnestness (particularly the emo and indie rock kids of the early ‘90s).
Obviously, one group’s defining norm, which is a conventional and possibly prescriptive (i.e. ought) strategy, can be seen as simply an aspirational fashion by outsiders. That is, the emotionally charged, self-reinforcing and group-defining cultural mechanisms of one group can become the emulated fashion of another. Particularly if the object group has some sort of cultural cachet or is otherwise aspirational. How does this work? Well, remember that cultural irony is most likely critical only at the strategic level – the level of group coordination – but not really at the individual level. It stabilized as a mechanism by which oppositional groups defined themselves, but the people in the group tend to live it as simply a fashion. When it’s emulated it loses its original group defining function – its oppositional or critical function – effectively reducing to a fashion or a simple coordinating function. The differentiating function has washed out through context change – from the oppositional trendsetter context to the less self-conscious regular joe context – leaving only the coordinating function.
Certainly, regular joes can be culturally ironic. But remember that good cultural irony depends on some people getting it and others not getting it. Quality irony requires a certain oppositional – in-group vs. out-group; those who get it vs. those who don’t – stance, and for regular joes that oppositional component is largely missing. Cultural irony is reduced to a funny fashion that may commandeer cultural artifacts, but it’s not really about re-defining those artifacts for oppositional in-group/out-group games. Everybody gets it. Effectively, when everybody’s ironic, nobody really is. Maybe this accounts for the felt but seldom articulated difference between the currently fashionable cultural irony and the sainted old sort fondly remembered by now aged hipsters and critical theorists.
But few, if any, old school bohemians were ever really culturally ironic in the idealized sense of fully self-consciously critical. That stance rapidly became an internalized or estimable way that folks who dig the cultural cachet of the fringe gain esteem among their select peers. Those critics and hoary old hipsters pining for the glory days of critical irony are greatly overstating – and oversimplifying – their case. Basically, their kvetching is more a matter of wanting to maintain counter-cultural cachet and difference than real sorrow at the dumbing of irony. As predicted by the trend curves, when cultural irony caught on among the regular joes, the trendsetters started clamoring for something different – authenticity and earnestness in this case – effectively coordinating on a new esteem game. That game, however, doesn't yet seem to have caught on like irony did.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
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.
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.
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