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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Did you read 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):

> I only have so much time left in my life to waste

So does everyone else. Which is why we don’t get PhDs in psychology, but instead use in-group memes to communicate information about each other.

I’ve absolutely been in conversations—in work, politics and play—where we assigned people we knew to characters in a book, movie or TV show we shared. Ignoring this overlooks a fundamental way people communicate.

We all know a ‘Lennie’ from ‘Of Mice and Men’.

> So does everyone else

Unless you are over 60, I doubt you feel time running out acutely enough to let that feeling guide your daily actions. If you are younger and those feelings do guide you, congratulations, you are doing it right.

> but instead use in-group memes

in-group memes are useless to anyone not in the group, but they are useful to signify that one is in the group. I'm don't believe The Office characters rise to the level of being generally useful for communication. It's like "Friends" which I know is popular and been in the news recently. If you said "Oh she is so blah-blah (Friends character name)" I wouldn't have a clue.

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.

> This kind of analysis was all the rage in the 1970

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).

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.

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)

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

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