An Ironic Cascade of Anti-Cascade
Within every generation, there exists a group of people looking to revolt against the norm. The 20s had flappers, the 60s had hippies, and the 90s had grunge… In the last decade, a new subculture has emerged in society: the hipster. These thrift shopping, local coffee drinking, thick-rimmed glasses wearing anomalies are the current generation’s warriors in the fight against conformity. While most people embrace the information cascade, obliviously choosing their music, clothing, and hygiene habits in accord with the majority, hipsters fear and resent the cascade. In fact, they will do anything and everything in their power to resist falling under the trap of common information. In this way, the modern hipster is an enigmatic figure in the light of information cascade networks.
Ironically enough, in attempting to avoid the information cascade, the societal interpretation of the hipster had spread like wildfire. To the great chagrin of the anti-mainstream, relevant soldiers, hipster culture has become not only common, but a brilliant pool of consumerism. Do you want to look like that guy who lives in your apartment building wearing holey clothes he bought at a thrift store’s half-off sale? If you pay approximately 37 times what he paid, you can have it! Do you like listening to music that sounds like small animals that are trapped in tiny cages? Buy a $100 concert ticket, and you can get the full experience!
In this way, “hipsterficiation,” as NPR has termed it, has taken popular culture by storm. The emergence and development of this culture is an example of an information cascade, but in a very unique and ironic way. The hipster attempts to make decisions that go against the grain of mainstream society, trying to avoid becoming one of the pack, trapped in the typical cascade of how-tos. Other members of society have seen the image that hipsters portray—the fashion, the music, the attitude—and has tried to adopt this look in a marketable way. The information has spread through a network that the creators were attempting to avoid—ironic, no?
As more and more hipsters emerge, the anti-mainstreamers are slowly becoming mainstream. They have become a node in the information cascade that they resent so fervently. And don’t forget the two big rules of being a hipster: (1) hate other hipsters and (2) vehemently disagree with anyone who suggests you could be a hipster. With these two golden rules, hipsters will continue to run away from the cultural information cascade. So, what happens when non-conformity becomes the new conformity? Well, the hipsters knew about these trends like, fourteen months ago after reading about them on an obscure blog you’ve never heard of. They were nodes in the network before it was like, even a network–and that’s all that matters.
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/16/142387490/the-hipsterfication-of-america