I regularly read the blog of one of my favorite authors, Donald Miller. Today I found he had posted some interesting thoughts on Advertising, specifically the advertising used by Apple, and the intrinsic values which we unknowingly accept in admitting the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. You might be thinking, "I don't go around talking to my friends about advertising and I've never thought about the effectiveness of advertising, never-mind admitted it," but the truth is you have and you do every time an advertisement leads you to buy or even just find out more about a product.
Anyway, nestled within Don's examination of the truth in our response to advertising I found an interesting nugget of over-looked, or misunderstood, truth worth thinking about (at least I think so). He takes a paragraph to discuss the truth about a counter-culture. Here's what he wrote:
"If you think about it, the most confident of counter-culture heros aren’t talking on i-phones, wearing designer jeans or jumping in the air in their facebook photos (why are all the hipsters suddenly jumping in their facebook photos? Why didn’t anybody call me to say we were doing that?) but instead are the people most of us might not notice. The reason we don’t notice these people is because they offer us no beneficial association. They buy products because the products work, they buy jeans because they cover their asses, and coats because a certain coat will keep them warm. A true counter culture is not manipulated by the whims of fashion and therefore is not made up of fashionable people."
A counter-culture is a subculture whose values and norms of behavior run counter to the mainstream of the day. Some typical ideas of counter-cultures usually include the punk scene, goths, mods, hippies, new agers, and the like. However, this is no-longer the case. While each of these subcultures was, at one time, a counter-culture, each has been assimilated into the mainstream as evident by the newest term for the people who used to be punks, mods, hippies, goths, and new agers; hipster. This is an all-encompassing term that seems to include aspects of each of these former subcultures. The skinny jeans and flannel from the punks, tattoos and piercings from the goths, skinny ties and big sunglasses from the mods, sundresses, clogs, and hemp jewelry from the hippies and more... This is all evidence of the fact that Don wrote about. None of these were true counter-cultures because they all share the same values and behavior; a constant search and desire for social acceptance.
I'll be the first to admit that I have often tried to subscribe to or associate myself with a counter-culture and now I find that I definitely fit into the hipster mold. I'm not trying to offend or discredit others who have done the same. I'm simply analyzing the idea and thinking about what a true counter-culture would be like. So to myself and all of my friends who subscribe the the views and fashions of a "counter-culture" I leave this quote that I found on my friend, Joel's, blog:
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. "
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