Visualizing the relationship between hipsters and PBR

http://blog.locu.com/post/46247974453/locu-digs-deep-into-pbr-data-hipsters-unphased

by mksm • 13 years ago

35 44 13 years ago

blog.locu.com

stdclass2• 13 years ago

The font-color you use in your blog is so horrible to read!

marcua4• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! Sending to our designer!:)

stdclass2• 13 years ago

Thanks for fixing it so quickly :)

karlshea• 13 years ago

Also trying to read it on an iPhone is a big fail. Full-sized site locked to a giant zoom level.

marcua4• 13 years ago

Thanks a bunch! On it!

peter_l_downs2• 13 years ago

Fixed — removed the 'user-scalable=no' that came by default with the Tumblr theme.

peter_l_downs2• 13 years ago

Should now be fixed — try refreshing (make sure to clear the cache)!

gphil• 13 years ago

Liked the article, would have loved to have seen Philly (where I live.) I have a hunch PBR would beat out Bud Light in a lot of spots...

Another piece of feedback: you should link to your startup's main page more prominently--I didn't find the link at first so I had to type in locu.com to see it.

marcua4• 13 years ago

Awesome! We're looking into making a more general-purpose city explorer.

And thanks for the feedback---we're on it!

blhack• 13 years ago

I am so sick of this term "hipster". It has become watered down to the point of complete meaninglessness.

I swear it has become a catchall for the world-of-warcraft set to apply to anybody that doesn't spend their time playing video games.

Ride a bike? HIPSTER!

Wear jeans? HIPSTER!

Listen to music? HIPSTER!

Like art? HIPSTER!

Enjoy non-sports-bars? HIPSTER!

Drink coffee? HIPSTER!

Like unpopular films? HIPSTER!

It's ridiculous, and seeing people actually use this term as though "hipster" is a cohesive group is embarrassing.

I drink PBR as my "stapble" beer. Why? Because it's cheap, and it tastes okay, and because I live in Arizona, and when I come inside from riding my bike (HIPSTER!) or walking my dog (hipster?) drinking some giant craft brew sounds terrible.

peterwwillis2• 13 years ago

One way to prove you're not a hipster is to be so out of touch with the definition of a hipster that you'd generalize that badly. Here, let me fix your list:

Ride a fixie? Wear tight pants? Listen to indie/obscure music? Finished one semester at an art school? Love dive bars? Live in seattle? Enjoy art-house and indie films? You're probably a hipster.

resu_nimda2• 13 years ago

Hipster has become a ubiquitous and largely non-pejorative term. Watered down is a good description. Yes, all of those things are hipster, and yes, some people are still angry about it. But, for the most part, it's just a word that describes a cultural subset that has widened greatly. Over the past few years I've transitioned from "ugh hipsters" to "yeah you could say I'm a hipster."

This has been my experience, in Austin.

pettazz• 13 years ago

> for the world-of-warcraft set to apply to anybody that doesn't spend their time playing video games

"I hate how all video game players generalize everyone else."

aqme28• 13 years ago

It's a catch-all term for people who don't fit cleanly into one of the other archetypes 20-somethings still somehow get labelled as (such as jock or nerd or prep).

waterlesscloud2• 13 years ago

I knew this was going to be the top comment on this story.

I'm a comment hipster.

JPKab3• 13 years ago

I was commenting on this link before it was posted. Posted comments are SOOO mainstream....

rm999• 13 years ago

Your criticism is off-base. Yes, some people have watered down the label hipster, but the communities this article discusses contain a much more pure form of hipster than what's entailed in the ordinary things you list. I spend a decent amount of time in Williamsburg and Bushwick, and a lot of the people there call themselves hipsters and live a lifestyle consistent with the stereotype.

Your comment is analogous to complaining that Big Bang Theory has watered down the word 'nerd', so now someone can no longer extrapolate patterns he finds at MIT and comic-con and describe them as nerd culture. It's a bad argument because those labels still hold cultural meaning, regardless of how some people have abused the labels.

resu_nimda2• 13 years ago

> Your comment is analogous to complaining that Big Bang Theory has watered down the word 'nerd', so now someone can no longer extrapolate patterns he finds at MIT and comic-con and describe them as nerd culture.

I don't see how the second clause follows from the first. Maybe it's just different definitions of "watered down." I think things like Big Bang Theory and the assimilation of nerd culture into the mainstream have watered it down, and are analogous.

MIT and comic-con are still nerd culture, but now all these other things are too, so that when you say the word "nerd" to someone, you have no idea what it means to them. It could be "true nerd culture" or anything else. Words like nerd and hipster used to have meaning; in other words, they were controversial, polarizing terms that triggered emotional responses and strong opinions. Now they're very general and common descriptions, that's what is meant by watered down.

JPKab3• 13 years ago

Miller High Life blows PBR away, FYI, and you can get it anywhere in the US. Its also cheaper than PBR, hipster. :)

In all seriousness, its a catch-all term, and I agree with you. Now go drink some High Life, put on some looser jeans, and go to a sports bar. And your fixed gear bicycle is an insult to the history of engineering.

freiheit• 13 years ago

They're made in the same plants.

rhizome• 13 years ago

Then why do you care whether the term "hipster" is meaningless?

josefresco• 13 years ago

"I swear it has become a catchall for the world-of-warcraft set to apply to anybody that doesn't spend their time playing video games."

I'm honestly confused. How did we start at hipsters and beer and end up with WoW players insulting non-video game players? How are the two related at all?

I'm guessing (wildly) you play WoW with older 30somethings who call you a hipster? I really have no idea, so someone please inform me if I'm off-base in my confusion about the connection between the two.

farinasa• 13 years ago

Of course this comment would show up. We get it. People overuse the word. You're offended because someone used it on you once and you only loosely fit the description. Instead of muddling the comments of every post that contains the word hipster simply because you take offense, at least have something to contribute to the discussion.

The same thing happened with punk, goth, emo, and now hipster. It will happen again. Either get used to it or actively avoid participating in the things that people stereotype as hipster. Since that is nearly impossible, just get used to it. People who get offended by labels are just as ignorant as those that use them.

And before you get all offended, you might want to think of every time you tried to label someone else as anything. It can be as simple as black, white, programmer, etc.

moheeb• 13 years ago

They'll all be drinking Old Milwaukee in a couple years.

dubya• 13 years ago

Has someone actually paid $10+ for a Bud Light?? There appear to be some issues with the data. I can see $4 and maybe $6 at a bar or restaurant, but $10-12 will get you a whole pitcher of drinkable beer. How was the data collected?

peterwwillis2• 13 years ago

You can get a bud light on South Beach for $25.

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

At fancy bars they want you to buy the $15 cocktail, but they'll begrudgingly give you a $10 Bud Light if you insist.

Also, stadiums and strip clubs.

juan_juarez• 13 years ago

Things in parts of NYC are extremely expensive. Doubly so if you're in an upscale club.

It's not that the beer is more expensive, it's that the cost of the labor involved in serving it to you and the real estate you're consuming it in cost more.

narag• 13 years ago

Hipster is a puzzling word for this non-native English reader. Dictionaries say that it's people with unconventional and modern tastes in music, clothes... I had detected an unexplained negative tone whenever I see it used. Now this article seems to suggest that there's also an economic factor. That would explain it. So instead of "modernos" I guess I should translate it as "pijos".

pnathan• 13 years ago

hipster is a subculture which has been around maybe ten years. It's fairly amorphous, and any dictionary which mentions it is almost certainly not quite correct.

I'd reckon that the key characteristics of hipster are some fuzzy idea of "authenticity", as well as a certain styling of preferred art. This often manifests itself in preferring bands that are just getting started and various curios that reflect a more primitive time. Unsophisticated bikes and a preference for 'irony' are also hallmarks of the idea.

Your mileage will vary.

bjterry• 13 years ago

Hipster is an older word that has been co-opted more recently to describe a contemporary subculture, so it's not surprising that dictionaries have it wrong. Also, the subculture itself is a little bit difficult to pin down because many of its members (as judged by outside observers) wouldn't identify as hipsters, necessarily. More can be found at Wikipedia, although the page is of mixed quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_%28contemporary_subcult...

lolcraft• 13 years ago

Add to that "gafapastas".

mdpye• 13 years ago

Gafapasta is probably the best choice I'm aware of. Pijo doesn't carry art-geek creds or suggest youth.

waterlesscloud2• 13 years ago

The pejorative implication is that it applies to someone whose tastes/fashions are outside the mainstream merely for the sake of being outside the mainstream.

There's a further implication that those tastes are just as much a result of groupthink as the mainstream tastes.

dionidium• 13 years ago

This is the only comment so far that gets at the actual pejorative connotation. That's also why particular sartorial and recreational commonalities are picked on. Seeing a guy on a fixed-gear bicycle in skinny girl-jeans, a v-neck tee, and an ironic mustache produces the same sort of feeling you might get if you saw somebody dressed as a newsboy from the 1920s. It's a costume, in other words.

marssaxman• 13 years ago

"Hipster" is basically just an insult. There is no group of people who calls themselves "hipsters", and in fact nobody agrees on who exactly the hipsters are. A tattooed bike messenger might insult a heavily bearded, Carhartts-wearing beer brewer for being a hipster, who might in turn mock the girl with the heavy glasses and the polka-dotted dress who works as a barista and spends her weekends digging through thrift shops for being a hipster, and she might then laugh at the couple down the street with the Subaru and the chicken coop in their back yard for being hipsters, and they might groan when they see the bike messenger and his friends at their local bar and complain about how all the hipsters have taken over. None of these people would think of themselves as hipsters, but someone two states away might refer to them all as hipsters when making fun of the neighborhood they all live in.

will_work4tears• 13 years ago

I actually got accused of being a hipster for no other reason than I use Linux exclusively - from an Apple fanboi.

columbo• 13 years ago

I'd be interest to see the same heat map with an overlay of average median income for each district. PBR might be a hipster thing, or it could be more of an indicator for a lower-income district.

Also, I wonder if chains were included as they could skew the results.

marcua4• 13 years ago

We're actually as interested as you in this. Doing data analysis on hipsters was fun, but we're hoping it's the start of much deeper and more meaningful studies. Joining our data with other macro- and micro-economic datasets will be awesome, as will looking at the data over time to build things like cost of living indices.

As to your chain question: they are included, and we're hoping to build a data explorer that lets folks like you filter down the data to make analyses more sound, as you suggest. You can do that sort of stuff right now on our API at http://dev.locu.com/. Let me know if you need help along the way!

JPKab3• 13 years ago

PBR is certainly not a popular beer with lower income drinkers. It's priced higher than comparable lagers. It didn't used to be, but then it became popular with a certain group of people.

teebs• 13 years ago

I think the relationship between PBR and hipsters is not that hipsters like PBR, but rather that dive bars sell PBR, and hipsters like dive bars (because they're cheap, "real," and not mainstream).

As someone from Portland, OR that went to college on the East Coast, I drink a lot more PBR in college than in bars at home. At home, Hamm's, Old German, Rainier, and other beers are common, cooler, and just as cheap. PBR is just cheap.

mynewwork• 13 years ago

How can you publish an article on hipsters without covering Austin or Portland?

zallarak• 13 years ago

This is too cool! I can only imagine what sort of other interesting relationships exist. Data like this offers the opportunity to answer some modern-day anthropological questions, especially in conjunction with other data sources.

Visualizing the relationship between hipsters and PBR

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