Really a spot on essay. I was actually talking about this topic with a dear friend of mine a while ago, and we considered some of the hypotheses reviewed here - like the one about nihilism. There are other possible explanations that I would like to put on the table:
1) Glibness can serve as a resource in the passive-aggressive toolkit: it's the strategy of the teenager that provokes you until you react, and then says "I was just kidding :)" or "Come on, can't you take a joke?". From both anecdotal and survey-based evidence, people tend to be more passive-aggressive online than in person, so the diffusion of social media might have indirectly contributed to promoting irony as a passive-aggressive strategy.
2) An environment in which we are always potentially joking frees people from responsibility: everything I say, no matter how reprehensible, can be easily reframed as a joke. Talking from my personal experience, it is increasingly common to hear people saying "I was joking!" as an excuse even in situations in which it is obvious that they were talking seriously. People tend to like a frivolous environment because it gives a handy excuse whenever they are spotted saying something false, stupid, immoral, or inappropriate.
3) Seriousness is associated with an allegedly "traditional" way of communicating and conducting one's life, so people who speak ironically believe that they are being somewhat innovative or anti-conformist, because they are deviating from the traditional way of communicating. Funnily enough, this association is largely due to ignorance. A friend of mine has called it the Three Musketeers Paradox: whenever a new film adaptation of the Three Musketeers is released, people - both audiences and critics - greet it as an ironic re-reading of Dumas's novel; that happened with the 1948 version directed by George Sidney starring Gene Kelly, then with the 1973 version directed by Richard Lester, and then with the 1993 version produced by Disney. The truth is, Dumas's novel itself is very ironic: the adaptations are not deviating from the source, but are simply trying to maintain the ironic spirit - though with different styles and different levels of success. Something similar happens with action films: it's common to hear people praising an action film because it is ironic "unlike most action films"; instead, it is actually very hard to find action films that are serious. In other words, it almost looks like every generation is convinced that the old world was uniformly serious and stodgy, and they are the ones who brought irony.
4) The life plan of many people in Western countries has changed: fewer people are having children, and fewer people are getting married. Bonding, building a family and bringing up children are not as common as they used to be, and thus many people seek other sources of purpose and meaning in life. Professional achievement and fun - or "having a good time" - are the most obvious candidates. Of course, there are other possible sources of purpose and meaning in life, such as the pursuit of knowledge and the appreciation of art and beauty, but those are always going to attract a minority of the human population. Since fun is one of the few things left, people are trying to sprinkle it everywhere, and glibness is a way of doing that. In addition to that, even those people who get married and/or have children tend to do it later than in the past generations: as a result, they stay in the "fun zone" for longer, so the fun-oriented mindset gets more ingrained into their habits - and that's how you get middle-aged guys going around with a little kid and a T-shirt with the slogan "I'm a dad who games" XD.
5) It has become common to dismiss high culture and art as elitist and anti-egalitarian cultural manifestations - this hypothesis relates to the Egalitarianism hypothesis considered in the essay. Despite that dismissal, people are still going to have certain intellectual and aesthetic needs to satisfy. Here is where irony and glibness come to rescue. Jokes offer an acceptable surrogate for deeper insights, and fun - in the most innocuous sense - offers an acceptable surrogate for the appreciation of art and beauty. Needless to say, high culture actually abounds with ironic and comic works - Molière, Rossini, and Lubitsch, to mention a few names from different art forms - but many people ignore that (see my hypothesis number 3). Notice that this hypothesis doesn't require taking at face value the division between high culture and low/pop culture: whether that division actually obtains or not is irrelevant here; what matters is that people tend to take that division for granted.
6) Online environment encourages the use of irony, because the absence of non-verbal cues makes every utterance more ambiguous than in in-person communication. Irony largely relies on ambiguity and multiplicity of reading, and thus an online environment facilitates its practice. This factor alone is not sufficient to explain the widespread "taste for frivolity", since people are also going to need a motivation for doing it, besides the preconditions for doing it; however, it is most likely a contributing factor.
Thank you for this submission, Iskra. I won't dare call it entertaining, but it was thought-provoking and distinctly edifying.
It also made me wonder about a possible connection between frivolity and the proliferation of the "cringe" phenomenon. There is something dialectical going on here, but my thoughts about it are barely well-formed enough to mention. On the one hand, it seems like the "cringe anxiety" betrays that people are implicitly seeking a rule (or set of rules) for how to conduct themselves properly in this new and ever-changing environment (a fact which frustrates the precipitation of any consistent rule set).
The "frivolous response" could be a reaction to either the inherent absence of consistent rules or it may represent a type of mass coping. After all, one cannot be cringe if one "isn't even trying, LOL." It's not uncommon, for example, to find maladjusted children in adolescence (maybe just atypical kids) actively defying (sometimes desperately) rule sets that are frustrating them in some way. It might be that they are not having success with adopting those rules, or that they just don't know them, or that they lack the facility to manage coordinating their behaviors when the rule set is complex. Their strategies can involve the invention of disparate rule sets or the apparent shirking of all rules. So, on the one hand, we have people being "so le random", but on the other, we see people being deplatformed for not recognizing whole sets of utterly novel rules related to pronouns and gender identities. It's a remarkable tension.
The tension is interesting. Seemingly, the value of the internet is the lack of a central authority to impose rules. Yet, people are behaving as though they are responding to the stress of the absence of such an authority, like we are in a "digital mass puberty" -- we all know how awkward we were during actual puberty.
I see no trend towards more frivolity. At least not in all spheres.
From the top of my mind:
(a) Official documents are as boring and hard to read as ever.
(b) In work meetings we go through the motions, with everyone bored, but present because we have to.
(c) Parents with kids frequently complain about lunchbox competitions, too many social activities, having to boil their soothers, etc. They comply because these are serious activities that serious parents do.
(d) Academic presentations and papers. These are *more serious* than before. Papers from the 60s are less formal than current papers. Everyone talks about careers and publishing, few about the "fun" part, the actual science.
(e) Young adults are often very serious about fitness, especially young males about weight-lifting.
* I'm not convinced Boaty McBoatface is a sign of our times. I imagine 1700 century farmers going for a similar ship name. Given the opportunity.
* Yes, memes are frivolous, as are real life jokes, pulp magazines, and drinking competitions.
Here in New Zealand we voted for a new national flag… we very nearly got this ‘Laser Kiwi’ flag! https://images.app.goo.gl/B3MYSxYcYUySDoaD8
Really a spot on essay. I was actually talking about this topic with a dear friend of mine a while ago, and we considered some of the hypotheses reviewed here - like the one about nihilism. There are other possible explanations that I would like to put on the table:
1) Glibness can serve as a resource in the passive-aggressive toolkit: it's the strategy of the teenager that provokes you until you react, and then says "I was just kidding :)" or "Come on, can't you take a joke?". From both anecdotal and survey-based evidence, people tend to be more passive-aggressive online than in person, so the diffusion of social media might have indirectly contributed to promoting irony as a passive-aggressive strategy.
2) An environment in which we are always potentially joking frees people from responsibility: everything I say, no matter how reprehensible, can be easily reframed as a joke. Talking from my personal experience, it is increasingly common to hear people saying "I was joking!" as an excuse even in situations in which it is obvious that they were talking seriously. People tend to like a frivolous environment because it gives a handy excuse whenever they are spotted saying something false, stupid, immoral, or inappropriate.
3) Seriousness is associated with an allegedly "traditional" way of communicating and conducting one's life, so people who speak ironically believe that they are being somewhat innovative or anti-conformist, because they are deviating from the traditional way of communicating. Funnily enough, this association is largely due to ignorance. A friend of mine has called it the Three Musketeers Paradox: whenever a new film adaptation of the Three Musketeers is released, people - both audiences and critics - greet it as an ironic re-reading of Dumas's novel; that happened with the 1948 version directed by George Sidney starring Gene Kelly, then with the 1973 version directed by Richard Lester, and then with the 1993 version produced by Disney. The truth is, Dumas's novel itself is very ironic: the adaptations are not deviating from the source, but are simply trying to maintain the ironic spirit - though with different styles and different levels of success. Something similar happens with action films: it's common to hear people praising an action film because it is ironic "unlike most action films"; instead, it is actually very hard to find action films that are serious. In other words, it almost looks like every generation is convinced that the old world was uniformly serious and stodgy, and they are the ones who brought irony.
4) The life plan of many people in Western countries has changed: fewer people are having children, and fewer people are getting married. Bonding, building a family and bringing up children are not as common as they used to be, and thus many people seek other sources of purpose and meaning in life. Professional achievement and fun - or "having a good time" - are the most obvious candidates. Of course, there are other possible sources of purpose and meaning in life, such as the pursuit of knowledge and the appreciation of art and beauty, but those are always going to attract a minority of the human population. Since fun is one of the few things left, people are trying to sprinkle it everywhere, and glibness is a way of doing that. In addition to that, even those people who get married and/or have children tend to do it later than in the past generations: as a result, they stay in the "fun zone" for longer, so the fun-oriented mindset gets more ingrained into their habits - and that's how you get middle-aged guys going around with a little kid and a T-shirt with the slogan "I'm a dad who games" XD.
5) It has become common to dismiss high culture and art as elitist and anti-egalitarian cultural manifestations - this hypothesis relates to the Egalitarianism hypothesis considered in the essay. Despite that dismissal, people are still going to have certain intellectual and aesthetic needs to satisfy. Here is where irony and glibness come to rescue. Jokes offer an acceptable surrogate for deeper insights, and fun - in the most innocuous sense - offers an acceptable surrogate for the appreciation of art and beauty. Needless to say, high culture actually abounds with ironic and comic works - Molière, Rossini, and Lubitsch, to mention a few names from different art forms - but many people ignore that (see my hypothesis number 3). Notice that this hypothesis doesn't require taking at face value the division between high culture and low/pop culture: whether that division actually obtains or not is irrelevant here; what matters is that people tend to take that division for granted.
6) Online environment encourages the use of irony, because the absence of non-verbal cues makes every utterance more ambiguous than in in-person communication. Irony largely relies on ambiguity and multiplicity of reading, and thus an online environment facilitates its practice. This factor alone is not sufficient to explain the widespread "taste for frivolity", since people are also going to need a motivation for doing it, besides the preconditions for doing it; however, it is most likely a contributing factor.
Thank you for this submission, Iskra. I won't dare call it entertaining, but it was thought-provoking and distinctly edifying.
It also made me wonder about a possible connection between frivolity and the proliferation of the "cringe" phenomenon. There is something dialectical going on here, but my thoughts about it are barely well-formed enough to mention. On the one hand, it seems like the "cringe anxiety" betrays that people are implicitly seeking a rule (or set of rules) for how to conduct themselves properly in this new and ever-changing environment (a fact which frustrates the precipitation of any consistent rule set).
The "frivolous response" could be a reaction to either the inherent absence of consistent rules or it may represent a type of mass coping. After all, one cannot be cringe if one "isn't even trying, LOL." It's not uncommon, for example, to find maladjusted children in adolescence (maybe just atypical kids) actively defying (sometimes desperately) rule sets that are frustrating them in some way. It might be that they are not having success with adopting those rules, or that they just don't know them, or that they lack the facility to manage coordinating their behaviors when the rule set is complex. Their strategies can involve the invention of disparate rule sets or the apparent shirking of all rules. So, on the one hand, we have people being "so le random", but on the other, we see people being deplatformed for not recognizing whole sets of utterly novel rules related to pronouns and gender identities. It's a remarkable tension.
The tension is interesting. Seemingly, the value of the internet is the lack of a central authority to impose rules. Yet, people are behaving as though they are responding to the stress of the absence of such an authority, like we are in a "digital mass puberty" -- we all know how awkward we were during actual puberty.
I see no trend towards more frivolity. At least not in all spheres.
From the top of my mind:
(a) Official documents are as boring and hard to read as ever.
(b) In work meetings we go through the motions, with everyone bored, but present because we have to.
(c) Parents with kids frequently complain about lunchbox competitions, too many social activities, having to boil their soothers, etc. They comply because these are serious activities that serious parents do.
(d) Academic presentations and papers. These are *more serious* than before. Papers from the 60s are less formal than current papers. Everyone talks about careers and publishing, few about the "fun" part, the actual science.
(e) Young adults are often very serious about fitness, especially young males about weight-lifting.
* I'm not convinced Boaty McBoatface is a sign of our times. I imagine 1700 century farmers going for a similar ship name. Given the opportunity.
* Yes, memes are frivolous, as are real life jokes, pulp magazines, and drinking competitions.