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Paper short abstract:

The hipster ethic consists of an elaborate self-fashioning while avoiding, at any cost, pinning down an identity. We suggest that this ethic shows a strong ‘elective affinity’ with the practice of ordinary social media use, particularly the ways in which people relate to brands on social media.

Paper long abstract:

Research on consumer attachments to brands in digital environments emphasise identification and self-expression .A similar emphasis on strong identification is central to an emerging literature on Instagram use. Like most of the literature on brand relations in digital environments, these studies have mostly been qualitative and focused on groups that are likely to exhibit high degrees of identification with brands.

However digital data also allows the possibility to study ordinary practices; a glimpse into the 'hidden abode' of mass behaviour that, until recently, has been inaccessible to social science. In this study we exploit this possibility.

Our study consists of a software device to track the smartphone activity of 30 students located in Sweden and Italy, 24/7, during a period of one month (gathering a data set of 166.223) and followed up with 4 focus groups and 20 individual interviews with participants whose social media use is average. Our preliminary results indicate that in ordinary social media use brands are not objects of identification, but rather used as tools for continuous self-fashioning. It is oriented towards what Boy and Uitermark (2015) call 'momentousness'. It seems rather than the very visualisation of intimate brand relations at a mass level that social media enables, tends itself to support and enforce a spirit of blandness, the avoidance of identification and the cultivation of liquidity. What hipsters showcase as an aesthetically refined style might be rooted in the general aesthetic of blandness that mediates the relations between brands and self for ordinary Instagram