Things hipsters don’t say

I am sure that at some stage during the previous week or two, everyone has encountered some form of a ‘things X don’t say’ page. When I say everyone, I mean everyone who has Facebook  (if you don’t, I very much congratulate you on your first class degree). While I’m sure we have all enjoyed the dry humour present in the pointing out of the many peculiar quirks we all experience throughout the various institutions and groups connected to us – be it here in York, our old schools, or being Jewish and from North London – I find the existence and enormous multiplication of these pages to be symptomatic of a worrying trend.

The observational humour applicable to a wide span of situations shown on these pages, is yet another in the string of fads that has hit the internet in the previous year. Their spread and impact on society at large is becoming almost staggering. First we had the ‘memes’; then Gangnam Style (anyone remember that?), the Harlem Shake, goats, and now this. Each provided something new that was easily accessible and exploitable. They exploded across the internet, and then grew to saturate our Facebook feeds – and, in the musical cases, our nights out too. After this saturation point is achieved, these ‘memes’ of sorts – both the Richard Dawkins definition and its internet offshoot – lose their sheen and fade back into obscurity and old-joke oblivion almost as quickly as they’d appeared.

It is, of course, logical that these ideas will, just as Gibbon’s Roman Empire, decline and fall. Gangnam Style claimed many an ankle and many more senses of pride, and all jokes grow old and die (except, for some reason, cat humour). However, what is becoming apparent is the catalytic power wielded by our dear WWW. While it is of course true that the information highway is incredibly powerful in bringing us closer together in our sharing of ideas, creativity, and humour, this is becoming somewhat of a double-edged sword. Without trying to sound whiny and entitled (that comes later), the speed with which an innovative idea spreads among us takes away a part of the feeling of individual connection we all get with our interactions with a new concept. Remember how we laughed at how someone said that Costcutter is overpriced? That was hilarious! But then when you look and see, say, a friend at Manchester or Bristol liking a post in their version, talking about their dismay at the overblown prices of…er…Costcutter, the shine’s off the apple.  Things stop being so original and fun when everyone else is just as involved as you are, as each further imitation dilutes the enjoyment of the original. That warm and fuzzy feeling of personal inclusion is gone, and there’s no getting it back. At least until the next bandwagon shows up.

Lamentations aside, there is quite frankly nothing we can do about this phenomenon. As things go, most of the time when one of us finds something really interesting, funny, or just damn good, we’ll tell someone, and word will spread – and this is by no means necessarily a bad thing. This will, however, bring increasing dismay among the more internet-savvy of us, as original and funny material will find itself ruined by ‘the mainstream’. This, depressingly, makes those people (myself included), the members of a new incarnation of the increasingly widespread disease of hipsterism. So yes, I am a hipster, I said it. But as the shelf-life of a fresh joke finds itself shortening with increasing rapidity, there is little more we can do than just enjoy the ride while it lasts, and suffer in silence when the tacky imitators come a-calling. While it is sad for us pseudo-hipsters that we can hardly claim any sort of right of emotional linkage to a ‘meme’ any more (short of creating one), we can still try and take some modicum of solace in the fact that we may hopefully have got there while it was still fresh. I mean, not that it really matters, anyway.