Observing Media Trends and Hipsters

Zooey Deschanel sporting "hipster" glasses. (image via Pinterest)

As I mentioned in a previous post, last year I took an incredible class on British Modernism. Although I really connected with many of the poems and works of fiction that we covered, my favorite thing about the class was that it drew connections between literature and other media. As well as reading the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and numerous others, we visited the Modern Wing of Chicago's Art Institute, watched clips from Salvador Dali's film Un Chien Andalou, and became acquainted with changes in technology that affected the creative content produced during this time. This was my first introduction to a subject that has now become the only thing I feel a deep enough interest to write about.

I have always had an interest in drawing connections between things I observed in my content-saturated world. I would notice things like the way models were wearing their make-up in magazines, or how a certain actor or actress would suddenly appear in several films at once-- subtle trends that might start off in a small way, but over time would become more apparent. I still pride myself on having become aware of the now overused “hipster” trends in alternative rock and fashion before they permeated mainstream culture. (In other words, I was hipster before it was cool. Bet you haven't heard that one before.) I often found that many of the trends I noticed were somehow connected, or that I could predict what would happen in certain media based on the similarity of two things; such as when I speculated that Johnny Depp would make a good Mad Hatter, and some time later came across an advertisement for Alice in Wonderland 2010. 

It wasn't until the very year that I studied the works of the great British Modernists that noticing these trends was in itself an entire field of study. That's when I started taking classes in media. This opened up a whole new world to me, because I started realizing that my observations weren't useless or silly, and that I wasn't just trying to make meaning where there was none. Ever since, I have allowed myself to follow up on these observations, and to share them with you all on this blog.

Sometime I will tell you about an interesting connection I made while enrolled in these classes. But that is another story for another day.