Subculture: The Idea of Style Lecture - My Thoughts

Richard said at the beginning of the documentary, that in his opinion, the closest thing that exists to a sub-culture at the moment is the hipster. I agree with him, and I think it's down to two reasons.

Since the 1990's, when the last true subculture ended, according to the documentary at least, Britain has become a lot more multi-cultural, and so mainstream society has a lot more ways of life within it than it ever has done in the past. This means that a lot more things are acceptable in todays youth culture, and things no longer need to be hidden within subcultures.

I also think that as society has become more sexualised and children are growing up faster, they go through the phase of wanting to identify themselves earlier than they used to. At the sort of ages that they want to express themselves nowadays they don't really have the freedom, means, organisation or communal power to make a real impact. Despite having said that I don't think there have been any true youth subcultures in my lifetime, I have been exposed to shouts of "emo" and "mosher" when walking through the park near my house back home by kids at least five years younger than me, at the age where image and identity is important to them.

I think this is pretty well summed up by the fact that I wouldn't really be able to classify many of the people I know at uni in any of the subcultures discussed today, because I think in the modern era, we're all passed the stage of being into a subculture. That said, the whole idea of a subculture is that you only associate with people in your own subculture, so why would I know anyone in a subculture given that I'm not in one myself. At least I don't think I'm in one anyway. I would imagine some people class being in at art school as a subculture, but if that was the case I would hate to be classed as an "art school kid".