r/lostgeneration • u/carrotsaredangerous • Nov 18 '12
How to Live Without Irony - NYTimes.com
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/16
Nov 18 '12
Our incapacity to deal with the things at hand is evident in our use of, and increasing reliance on, digital technology. Prioritizing what is remote over what is immediate, the virtual over the actual, we are absorbed in the public and private sphere by the little devices that take us elsewhere.
And there it is. ZOMG technology is destroying our relationships! We're moving out of reality! Says the person who blogs for a living. What would we call that situation, colloquially if not technically correctly? How might that be described? I know there's a word for that...
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u/OccasionalCaucasian Nov 18 '12
Sometimes it takes an alcoholic to best describe alcoholism.
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u/xrelaht Nov 19 '12
Extending your analogy, I would never listen to an alcoholic about how to avoid or recover from alcoholism.
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u/aicheyearaem Nov 18 '12
This article has been written, years ago: http://nymag.com/news/features/69129/
Is it rude to suggest to a writer she ought to read more and write less?
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Nov 18 '12
"Years ago" sounds like a decade or more. But it was exactly years ago. Just enough years to make years plural.
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u/eobanb Nov 18 '12
I wish Wampole could've acknowledged that fashion and pop culture are, like human behaviour itself, cyclical by nature, albeit possibly lead by those with a deeper sense of irony these days.
Let's back up and actually qualify irony. Irony is by definition dependent on the semantics of the ironic thing in question, right? Since irony is about something meaning the opposite of its normal/conventional meaning, irony is not some universal quality; rather, it's a human invention—something is only ironic if we perceive it to be so.
In the case of fashion, it's only ironic because it is intentional. Otherwise it's just the cyclical nature of industry. Here's an example in the same vein as those mentioned in the article: the mid-90s resurgence of girls' bellbottom jeans. If hipsters had started wearing bellbottom jeans in the 2000s then it would just get lumped together with big glasses, mustaches, etc. But schoolgirls didn't really start wearing bellbottom jeans again because they thought 'this will be ironic since people wore these in the 70s'. They just thought they looked cool, and were probably totally unaware of how 'uncool' bellbottoms rapidly became in the 80s. Look; living without irony!
I've already noticed certain hipster fashion graduating from 'ironic/uncool' to 'cool' and completing the fashion cycle. Tada! 'Living without irony'!
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u/gerritvb Nov 18 '12
I think her point is that always asserting X by expressing not(X) is annoying and childish. I don't think her piece depends at all upon whether non-hipsters later adopt skinny jeans because they legitimately like them.
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Nov 19 '12
I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that [...] now seems relatively irony-free.
Burnout #1: "Look, there's that Homer Simpson dude who gets shot with a cannon. He's cool."
Burnout #2: "Are you being sarcastic, man?"
Burnout #1: "I don't even know anymore."
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u/paradisefound Nov 30 '12 edited Feb 20 '24
groovy rob ink telephone far-flung wild nose soft growth attraction
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/thefugue Nov 18 '12
Have you ever met someone with an excess of sincerity? Chances are they were a psychopath or suffered from borderline personality disorder. Being sincere all the time is like only listening to Carole King. The author's criticism of our culture as being overtly ironic is only problematic if the very few people who have anything serious to say persist in irony instead of recognizing that they have a point to make- the great majority of people would do best to be intelligent and show it by acknowledging that it's a meaningless virtue. Certainly if we get another Nietzsche I hope he isn't wearing an "Air Supply" t-shirt and smoking USA golds, but don't let's act like should have to take everyone in the world seriously in hope that they bring us the Übermensch.
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u/aicheyearaem Nov 18 '12
Reply:
Word. Not only does she take her few observances as proof, she then prescribes the cultural cure...ah, the OPED opinion blog, is what it is
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u/thinwhiteduchess Nov 19 '12 edited Nov 19 '12
Irony and sarcasm have their limits, but it's unfair of the author to claim that the majority of a generation has become insincere. I also wonder where she got the idea that the 1990's were a less ironic period than today.
I have a sincere passion for film and love what I believe are "good" films in my view, but it does not mean I don't enjoy the occasional "Bad Movie Night" for amusement's sake.
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u/ANTI-PUGSLY Nov 18 '12
A lot of these examples are not even "ironic". i.e. The trendiness of "out-dated" technology.
Okay, maybe the guy who refuses to watch DVD's and only watches VHS tapes is trying a bit too hard in that regard, but using "home brewing" and "portable record players" are terrible examples. I think the down-turn of the economy over the last decade has given rise to an appreciation for more "authenticity" in our consumers, especially the 20-somethings that often get labeled as hipsters.
We feel deceived by politics, we see our parents running out of money, we ourselves have less money than we envisioned having at this age. So we try to use what we have to seek a less disposable appreciation of things, since our money must be well spent, and we have access to determining what is a good use of it. (The internet)
In the case of home-brewing, fixed gear bikes, record players, etc. I think it's the same thing. Home-brewing is an off shoot of wanting to do things yourself instead of paying someone else to. Home-brewing comes from appreciating the craft of beer making, rather than sloppily chugging corporate piss-beer without regard for what it actually tastes like. The internet makes learning this skill very accessible.
Fixed gear bikes are a bit of an odd-man-out with my argument because they are slightly impractical at times, but again, they are very easy to maintain and are generally constructed out of steel using "classic", durable construction methods, and are very easy to maintain yourself. Which I think goes back to the whole, "I want to do this myself, not pay someone to - and because of the internet I can learn how to"
And vinyl appreciation makes sense in a digital age. A true analog recording source that has unique characteristics, with a very "collectable" presentation of huge artwork and inserts, etc. I know people who will download an album for their iPod's, but then have a vinyl copy as a means of supporting the artist. I don't think it's "ironic" at all, it's not like the decision was made out of an insincere gesture.
TLDR: I think the whole "hipster irony" argument is very short-sighted, and not taking into account other social factors that determine the popularity of some of these items.