JJ

To Be or Not To Be: The Hipster Paradox

 Posted by on Wed, 9/14 at 11:11am  mini analysis  No Responses »
Sep 142016
 

Looking online, I’ve found that almost everyone has something to say about hipsters. Some identify with them by revolting against popular culture and revolutionizing fashion trends. Others find them pretentious individuals obsessed with reveling in a superficial manner. Many of these discussions regarding these ‘outward-focused and shallow’ hipsters can be found on forums like Reddit.com/r/hipsters. This forum is dedicated to poking fun at hipster culture and outing them whenever possible. I found something interesting though while reading about this culture. Many people discussed hipsters as if they were a ‘culture’, but I specifically remember both everyday people and hipsters defining the movement as being counter-culture. Somehow this doesn’t make sense though. Can you be considered a culture if your whole movement is considered an expression of individualism through something called counter-culture. To get a better understanding of what hipster means, I looked up the meaning in a few online dictionaries. The Marium-Webster dictionary describes ‘Hipster’ as “A person who follows the latest styles and fashions”(Marium-Webster). This seemed odd to me, because I thought a hipster was quite the opposite. The Oxford dictionary defines it as “a person who follows the latest trends and fashions, especially those regarded as being outside the cultural mainstream”(Oxford). This definition made more sense, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was a contradiction. It seems that scholars seem to define hipsters as people who follow the latest trends and at the same time they despise popular trends known as mainstream culture. I looked up the meaning on Urban dictionary and I found this. “Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20’s and 30’s that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.” This sounds more like the hipsters we hear about everyday, but something still feels off. Maybe it’s the fact that this is becoming more mainstream then we realize. Everywhere you go in major cities, university campuses, coffee shops and bars, you see people sporting plaid shirts, long beards and fake glasses. And if not then you have a friend who doesn’t exactly fit this mold, but they still consider themselves a hipster. And if not, then ask a few of your friends if they like “independent thinking, progressive politics….[and] creativity” (Urban Dictionary). You find that it’s actually pretty easy to fit the mold of a Hipster if you use any of these definitions. So this begs the question, what is a hipster? It seems that their is mass confusion not only among average people and scholars, but hipsters themselves.

I found an interesting video on YouTube where a popular youtuber explains what a hipster is. He says “Hipsters adopt the styles and affects of many cultures, cultures that aren’t theirs, cultures that they don’t actually belong to…we see hipster choices as performative. They are pretending and worse yet…mocking”(PBS Idea Channel). This explanation gives us so much more depth to what it means to be hipster. If the hipster culture is more performative than people expressing their actual own tastes, then is it all just (forgive my language) bullshit? Are people acting out and just wearing lumber jack shirts and sporting handle bar mustaches just for the sake of seeming ‘counter-culture’? It seems like we have an entire population of young adults having a simultaneous identity crisis. An identity crisis that is scarily similar to what we see in adults in their 50’s who have their first mid-life crises. But can we so easily write it off hipster culture just that easy? I believe that their is so much more depth to this then what’s on the surface. I asked a self-diagnosed hipster what he thought a hipster was and he gave me this response. “A hipster is someone how doesn’t go with the grain, but against the grain of society. They are people who don’t follow societal peer pressures.” Now this could be taken as another aspect of individuality that hipsters possess, but why are they so obsessed with individuality? I asked another friend of mine who wasn’t a hipster, what it means to be hipster. She said “Hipsters are a subculture linked by the desire to be counterculture, however, the interests and actions of hipsters often fall in line with the same societal norms that they often oppose.” So what we can take from this is that she finds hipsters to be hypocrites.

I did some thinking and I did it while watching the Simpsons. And light bulb went off in my head. I remembered a popular phrase. “The Simpsons did it!” Then it hit me, what if we live in an age where creativity is for the most part dead. Every time you write something or do something, you can’t help but feel as if its already been done. Nothing is really original anymore or at least it feels that way. You see this in movies, books, history and trends.  I think as a society, we’ve unconsciously realize that we’ve used up all of our creativity. This realization has its consequences. Old movies are remade, tropes in books are redone over and over again, history repeats itself……hipsters revive old fashion trends. I think as a society we’ve hit what some call ‘writer’s block’. We’ve hit an impasse in our creativity and they only way we can express our individualism is to revive old passions. Some people hate what they see in the mainstream, because they are tired of seeing the same thing over and over again. Can you blame them? For example, If you watch the same TV show on Netflix over and over again because all of your friends love it, wouldn’t it drive you crazy? It would. You would demand to watch something else, but if their is nothing else new on, what would you do? You would put on a classic or maybe something a little weird, just to try it. This is what hipsters do, but with their lives. They are the people to tell us “We’ve quite had enough of this mainstream nonsense, let’s try something else for a while even if its something we’ve done before.”

Learning to Write Again.

 Posted by on Thu, 9/8 at 4:34pm  Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 082016
 

Reid asks about the origins of exigency in the writer and honestly I had to look this term up. Exigency (for any of you that skim this to get a basis on how to write your post) is an urgent need or demand. So an exigency to write would be like an urge or a calling to write about something. Whether it be personal or informative, you find a topic and you just write until you’re satisfied.

Recently, I haven’t had exigency to write about anything. My ENC classes offered no outlet to my writing abilities, because all of the topics were either uninteresting to me or done thousands of times before by freshmen. One losses motivation to write when they learn that they have 4 topics to talk about: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Technology. It seems that not a single person in freshmen writing classes writes anything interesting or groundbreaking. Understandably, this is because this is the period when professors teach students how to write. So overall, I feel as if my writing skills have actually declined due to my lack of inspiration.

In high school, I spent a lot of time writing stories and poems. I won’t admit that any of it was groundbreaking or even grammatically correct, but it was so entertaining! I first came up with the idea to write when I started reading those terribly cheap novels on amazon. You know, the ones that you’ll never admit that you read, even to your best friends. I read many of these novels on my kindle at night, not falling asleep till 4 in the morning. I flipped through pages and pages of dystopians, elvish worlds, vampire horrors, infected cities and worse. All of these were trashy $1 novels but I loved every bit of it. Then I figured that I could even write the same kind of stories. Now what follows is pure exigency. I felt motivated to make groundbreaking works in these fields. I even started reading up on Poe, Orwell, Greene, Asimov, Wells, Lovecraft and many others just to get a better understanding of fiction. I was thrilled about writing fiction and I started to find that whatever I wrote followed my mood. I found that when I was blissful because a girl I had a crush on texted me back, I wrote happy endings about heroes conquering their fears. But when I was tackling grief due to the loss of my father and the fracture in my family, my stories were dark and terrifying. They strangely took on a life of their own resembling works by Poe and Lovecraft. I never did any of this intentionally but I found that when I wrote, I wrote what was in my heart at the time.

Now theirs probably something significant that a therapist could tell me about my writing tendencies, about who I am and how it all made me feel, but that isn’t the point of this post. The point is that I miss that. Not reading trashy teen novels and certainly not writing about dark worlds or happy endings, but I miss writing. I don’t want to be forced to write about topics that interest just my professor or topics that everyone in my class wants to talk about. I want to write about something that makes me feel like I have a voice. It’s important to feel exigency while your writing and not just in your fantasy novels, but in your papers too. If we don’t find our topics interesting, then we won’t be interested in what we are writing about. Our papers will turn to mush and the professor will fall asleep reading it. So thank you Julia, for teaching us to love to write again.

New Implications for Language

 Posted by on Thu, 9/8 at 1:00pm  Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 082016
 

The podcasts Words made some very interesting connections with language that raises a lot of questions. I took a psychology course at FAU and we briefly went over the phase in a child’s life where they start to develop spatial reasoning, but the child is supposed to develop language way before this. The idea that language as we know it doesn’t actually develop in a child’s brain until they reach 6 was eye opening to me. I’ve always heard the saying that children are like sponges. They repeat whatever you say right back to you. Sometimes they will make small connections to words and the things that they want, but do they truly understand who they are and what the world around them is?

Moving on to the the boy without language, here we find another astounding discovery. When Julia told us to, “Think about something outside of language,” I honestly didn’t think to hard about it. I thought to myself “That’s impossible.” Everything we think about involves language. However, what about for people who were born deaf and were never introduced to sign language. I never even considered this and I was utterly surprised to learn the answer. They don’t have language! They have this long process of describing an event without words, symbols or signs. They never understood that everything has a word or symbol and their brains never made the connection. The truly astonishing part is how once this connection is made, they can’t go back. It’s like the brain learned an easier way to communicate and it left the other method behind. This begs the question, are their other skills or ways of processing information that we just simply forget because our brains don’t need them anymore. I took a linguistics course and I learned that linguistics believe that over time, languages become simpler. Conjunctions are formed, words symplified, grammar simplifies and so on so forth. Is it possible that their is a correlation between these two concepts. What if the same part of our brain that simplifies language is also responsible for making necessary connections between parts of our brain to simplify our own understanding of language.

Language should no longer be looked at as tools, because tools aren’t necessary. Tools can be used, exchanged, forgotten and disposed of. Language is nothing like this. Once you learn language, you can’t unlearn it and once you do use it, language changes the way you see the world. I believe to truly understand what it means to be human, one must understand what language is and how much of a role it plays in developing our brains.

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