This week, a parody Instagram account, poking fun at the “Generation Hipster,” has become an Internet sensation, growing from 66,000 followers to 826,000 in just a few days.
The hipster alter ego
…takes artsy pictures of morning coffee, snaps selfies with pseudo philosophical expressions and is fashion-conscious. You’ve heard all these stereotypes before. These are the clichés applied to a small and fundamentally insignificant subset of a generation, which are being satirized by the Socality Barbie Instagram account.
Hipster Barbie: #liveauthentic
The woman behind the initiative, a wedding photographer from Portland, Oregon, who prefers to remain anonymous, crafted the Instagram account about three months ago to poke fun at those hashtagging photos with #liveauthentic and #socality.
“People were all taking the same pictures in the same places and using the same captions,” she says. “I couldn’t tell any of their pictures apart so I thought, ‘What better way to make my point than with a mass-produced doll?'”
Images of Hipster Barbie sipping an artfully foamed cappuccino, wearing a beanie hat and thick-rimmed glasses, relaxing in a hammock or jumping in front of the sunset on a beach, have intruded streams of Instagram photos.
“Could I be any more authentic?” the doll asks in the captions.
Instagram Is…
Yes, Instagram can be a never-ending agglomeration of vain selfies taken in exotic lands, but the photo-sharing app is much more than a platform used to boost one’s ego.
The short documentary Instagram Is, for instance, explores how something as digital as a mobile app actually encourages people to move away their devices and into the analog world.
“In a culture immersed in technology, Instagram is reviving adventure, face to face community & real relationships,” the filmmakers write.
Calling millennials “hipsters” is inaccurate
It’s understandable why the Socality Barbie account received so much media attention, but the experiment is as much fun as it is pretentious in its own ways.
Is a narcissistic hipster the first image that comes to mind, as millennials start to define themselves? The term is often associated with limited political participation, facial hair and low ambition in life. Articles describe hipsters as members of a “movement with no direction” and as “poster children” for an entire age group that will be “forever known as the generation that sat and watched as their country plummeted into debt, war, handpicked coffee grounds, and handlebar mustaches.”
Wow. If that’s the case, there’s something extremely wrong with how the world labels today’s generation, and Sociality Barbie is doing nothing but reinforcing the hipster stereotype. Maybe it’s time to stop ridiculing.
Hipster Barbie: Diversity vs stereotypes
Millennials comprise about 77-80 million of the population in America alone. This group of people is actually “more socioeconomically, ethnically, and ideologically diverse than any generation that’s come before,” Tom Hawking writes for Flavorwire.
From the kid of a refugee, working at a 7-Eleven to save money for college, to the African-American single mother waiting tables for tips, millennials are simply too diverse to classify under the reductive hipster stereotype. The majority of millennials aren’t privileged, white, and middle-class, Hawking reminds readers.
Millennial generation in popular culture
“There’s a sort of determined ignorance about the way that the millennial generation is depicted in popular culture, a sense that the people doing the stereotyping don’t really want to know the the truth behind their clichés, because the truth is difficult and complicated and doesn’t make for being put into a convenient box like the hipster image does,” Hawking says.
“But we should demand better, because a cultural discourse that consists of variations on the phrase “These darn kids and their darn smartphones” helps precisely no one.”
Next time, maybe someone will come up with an Instagram account showcasing diversity rather than reinforcing stereotypes.
What do you think of Hipster Barbie and the millennial generation? Share your views in the comments section below.
