In my new book,
The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, I look at the strange and surprising process by which cool became uncool. Yes, you heard me correctly: it may sound like a paradox, but cool isn't hip any more.
The signs of this are everywhere, and start with the word itself. I am not sure when the deliberate misspelling of cool as "kewl" started, but a quick search for the phrase “is not kewl” on Google comes back with 50,000 hits. Oddly enough, there is even a competitor to Google, a new search engine called Cuil, which is itself a deliberate misspelling of the word.
Everywhere you look, cool is being mocked. And not just on the web. On TV, nerds are in the ascendancy, as demonstrated by shows such as Beauty and the Geek, Ugly Betty, The Big Bang Theory, and Chuck. And a whole series of books are reinforcing the point. Browse through this web site, and check out Geek Chic, American Nerd, A Girl's Guide to Dating a Geek, The Geek Handbook, and Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them, to name a few.
And if you still doubt the cool is on the decline, I will say two words, and just two words, to make my case... [pause for dramatic effect]... Susan Boyle.
But the most striking sign of the death of cool is coming from people abandoning TV, and embracing forms of media that deal with real people in real life situations. The popularity of Facebook and Twitter shows that tens of millions of people are more interested in others just like themselves than in glamorous celebrities. The TV networks have figured this out, and have fought back with a proliferation of reality shows. In short, no matter where you turn, the cool people are losing out to everyday folks.
Why is this happening? In my book The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, I trace the changing psychographic and demographic trends that paved the way for this shift in public attitudes. Back in the 1970s, a researcher named Arnold Mitchell — he's unfairly forgotten nowadays and not even listed in Wikipedia — identified a small but rapidly growing group of cool-resistant consumers. At that time they represented only 1-2% of the population, but Mitchell saw that this was the fastest growing demographic group in America, and predicted that these individuals would eventually become a dominant force in society.
Their numbers have increased dramatically since that time, and the anti-cool attitudes they espouse have now gone mainstream. In short, an obsession with cool is like a disease and after the epidemic has spread, the survivors have developed an immunity to it. We are now living in the post-epidemic stage, but very few people have recognized the implications.
Contributing to this resistance has been the over-marketing of the cool. Back in the 1950s, the word "cool" was typically applied to a person — a Marlon Brando or Miles Davis. But nowadays, cool is usually attached to merchandise. Do a Google search on "cool" and "gadget" and you get ten million hits. What was once a type of charisma and personal vibe has been reduced to advertising spiel. No wonder the younger generation is mocking the cool!
Can cool make a comeback? In my book I show how life after cool has many of its own problems, and is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. But for the time being, the nerds and dweebs and everyday people are in the ascendancy. And if you are involved in marketing or entertainment or media or the arts or management, and a host of other fields, you ignore this shift at your own peril.
More on this tomorrow.