This kind of analysis was all the rage in the 1970's, when articles were written about how the type of car you drove advertised your inner sexual feelings and how he Edsel failed because the front grill looked like a vagina.
This might be somewhat accurate for people over 35, but it doesn't sound like any younger people I know. The complexities of the younger generations raised on the internet is something new and difficult to pin down.
The internet allows a person to escape the moderating influence of peer pressure and social norms by allowing one to anonymously be part of many different social groups simultaneously and be a different person in each one. There is no friction in mixing and matching your tribes, allowing a fluidity of identity that carries over into real life. I don't think this is captured by the article.
> As tidy as this characterization might be, it won’t last. The creative aesthetic is already getting transformed again, through a peaceful merger just like with the BoBos. There’s a new aesthetic in town with outsize influence: Very Online people.
> it’s democratized opportunity to learn and rehearse popular aesthetic.
> As the internet becomes not only where we draw our cultural and aesthetic cues from, but more importantly where we go practice them and rehearse them throughout our adolescence, our emerging aesthetic as adults will have a lot less to do with our parents and our inherited social standing, and a lot more to do with where we happened to have spent time on the internet frontier growing up
I didn't make it to the conclusion. I didn't make it past:
> So there you have it: the three aesthetics of the creative class. Some people are playing Dwight, some people are playing Michael, and some people are playing Andy.
I only have so much time left in my life to waste
But I'm glad the author and I came to similar conclusions. The author takes a turn I agree with at the end, which I didn't see coming from the prior paragraphs (copied the line again for emphasis):
> As the internet becomes not only where we draw our cultural and aesthetic cues from, but more importantly where we go practice them and rehearse them throughout our adolescence, our emerging aesthetic as adults will have a lot less to do with our parents and our inherited social standing, and a lot more to do with where we happened to have spent time on the internet frontier growing up
Not to mention, The Office is a pretty old show at this point for tortured sociological metaphors. Especially since the Gervais Principle came out a dozen years ago.
> This is the group of people that keep the advertising industry in business, for they are both highly anxious and impressionable, but also convinced that ads don’t work on them.
I dunno… Seems to describe some group I know very well.
It's easy to be snobbish about it if you want to point out that it's not a scientific study published in a journal with Very Serious People as gatekeepers...
...but I think this one is onto something, and I wouldn't be surprised to see significant correlations between the behaviours described and social class as defined by relatively recent work e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003803851348112...
(The above takes into account social and cultural activities and classifies Brits as elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emergent service workers, precariat)
No, it's all fun bar stool conversation. I'm not sure anyone actually talks about another as a "Michael Scott" or a "Dwight Schrute" for reals. I just wish young people talked about Boomers in a more nuanced way. We used to be known as the "Me Generation," which I think that is more apt.
In my experience the “Bobos” were never really subsumed by the creative class - and I’d wonder if the creative class even has the top rung on the ladder - or jumps into The Office at all - it is a paper company after all.
We know that the office does a great job of recreating the type of people you find in a boring office job so it’s no surprise that they match up with these different sociological profiles somewhat well - but there’s other personalities too in the show, which match up with people you may find in your own office. Do Jim, Pam, Kelly, Meredith, Toby, Jan, Stanley, Kevin, and Angela fit into each of these three buckets? Or are they simply “Proles”?
> They celebrate open-concept renovations as great for entertaining, but fail to recognize that the best spaces for throwing parties are actually houses with many divided rooms.
This is so annoying about gatherings in many people’s homes today. You basically have to custom build a new home or do some major revisions to any home built in the last 20 to 30 years to get a decent non open layout.
Having spent most of my life in the UK where there's not a vast amount of space, in houses with smaller, divided rooms, the wide open feel of (say) Australian houses and the larger American ones is a breath of fresh air.
Many British houses have very small rooms that are too small, but there is a happy medium where separate rooms can allow for a group of people to watch a game, and another group to cook, and another to do something else, rather than all of that happening in one space with voices getting louder and louder to compete with each other and the echoes.
One space is not a problem with a 4 to 6 person gathering, but it can get untenable after that.
Readit News
This might be somewhat accurate for people over 35, but it doesn't sound like any younger people I know. The complexities of the younger generations raised on the internet is something new and difficult to pin down.
The internet allows a person to escape the moderating influence of peer pressure and social norms by allowing one to anonymously be part of many different social groups simultaneously and be a different person in each one. There is no friction in mixing and matching your tribes, allowing a fluidity of identity that carries over into real life. I don't think this is captured by the article.
> As tidy as this characterization might be, it won’t last. The creative aesthetic is already getting transformed again, through a peaceful merger just like with the BoBos. There’s a new aesthetic in town with outsize influence: Very Online people.
> it’s democratized opportunity to learn and rehearse popular aesthetic.
> As the internet becomes not only where we draw our cultural and aesthetic cues from, but more importantly where we go practice them and rehearse them throughout our adolescence, our emerging aesthetic as adults will have a lot less to do with our parents and our inherited social standing, and a lot more to do with where we happened to have spent time on the internet frontier growing up
> So there you have it: the three aesthetics of the creative class. Some people are playing Dwight, some people are playing Michael, and some people are playing Andy.
I only have so much time left in my life to waste
But I'm glad the author and I came to similar conclusions. The author takes a turn I agree with at the end, which I didn't see coming from the prior paragraphs (copied the line again for emphasis):
> As the internet becomes not only where we draw our cultural and aesthetic cues from, but more importantly where we go practice them and rehearse them throughout our adolescence, our emerging aesthetic as adults will have a lot less to do with our parents and our inherited social standing, and a lot more to do with where we happened to have spent time on the internet frontier growing up
I dunno… Seems to describe some group I know very well.
Is it any worse than classifying people as Boomer, Millennial or Gen X?
Or Buzzfeed "We Know Your Best Quality Based On How You Drink Your Milo" (a quiz on Buzzfeed AU right now).
...but I think this one is onto something, and I wouldn't be surprised to see significant correlations between the behaviours described and social class as defined by relatively recent work e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003803851348112...
(The above takes into account social and cultural activities and classifies Brits as elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emergent service workers, precariat)
The BBC used to have an interactive version of the above, but it's broken (again!) - if you report it they'll probably fix https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973
We know that the office does a great job of recreating the type of people you find in a boring office job so it’s no surprise that they match up with these different sociological profiles somewhat well - but there’s other personalities too in the show, which match up with people you may find in your own office. Do Jim, Pam, Kelly, Meredith, Toby, Jan, Stanley, Kevin, and Angela fit into each of these three buckets? Or are they simply “Proles”?
Im leaning towards ripoff because he basically copied it down to the same TV show and same kind of analysis
If only this was *really* true.
Actually, also fashion and music trends, lots of things. The bohemians just suck at capitalism.
So it's not true, since the point was about capital.
Were they, though? From what I could find online:
Felix Biederman - University of St Thomas in Minnesota
Matt Christman - Carroll College in Wisconsin
Will Menaker - Skidmore College
This is so annoying about gatherings in many people’s homes today. You basically have to custom build a new home or do some major revisions to any home built in the last 20 to 30 years to get a decent non open layout.
Having spent most of my life in the UK where there's not a vast amount of space, in houses with smaller, divided rooms, the wide open feel of (say) Australian houses and the larger American ones is a breath of fresh air.
One space is not a problem with a 4 to 6 person gathering, but it can get untenable after that.
The technical posts seem pretty neutral, but the more philosophical ones give off real Michael vibes.