When I was in seminary I would jokingly invite people to sit with me at the "cool kids club." Given my own shyness and geekyness it was far more an attempt at humor than an assertion of my own trendiness. Simply by calling it the "cool kids club" I could not make it cool any more than repeatedly stating "bow ties are cool" makes that statement true. (The use of Dr. Who in my example might be a further proof of my un-coolness ... or proof of how amazingly cool I am) What brings all of this to mind is that yesterday I was reading yet another article about the demise of Facebook and how it is now clearly uncool.
I am not an expert on social media or social trends, but it feels like for at least a couple of years I have seen these stories about the decline of Facebook as if it is only a matter of time, and a short matter of time at that, before Facebook is too big, successful, evil, whatever to be cool and we must move on to something else. I have seen several reasons expressed for why Facebook is/will be in decline. The CNN article seems to imply that one of the declines of Facebook was when parents and shudder grandparents starting using Facebook. Something cannot be cool if everyone is doing it!
What bothers me about all this is that as a society we place a ton of value on being cool and generally seem to define coolness in such a way that it is impossible for the public to be cool. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we chase after something that by definition we can almost never attain. We fight against it ... I went to a school of non-conformists (we all seemed to fight conformity in the same ways). Some people resist the pressure to be cool by being deliberately uncool ... in a way that is clear to be perceived by others as being cool. I was fighting against the pressures to be cool by jokingly creating a "cool kids club" so that by definition myself and really anyone could be cool. In the end I think we are longing for community and we are longing for connection. Coolness is all about a desire by us to be loved by others and to be invited in to something greater than ourselves. Maybe we would be better off if we worried less about trying to be cool ourselves and instead worried about making those around us feel cool and the world would be a better place. Besides we all know that anyone who hangs out with cool people has got to be cool as well.
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Coolness has for lack of better word democritized dramatically in the last 10 years with the advert of social networks, podcasts, and the general prevalence of the so called geek/nerd culture. Almost every subgroup can claim a champion or touchstone in the wider cultural movement as their ideal avatar and immediately have an established community agree with them. That said Jeff is a pretty cool cat, what with the walking around barefoot and baking bread in the dorms, that should rate at least I quiet cool.
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