On a Hunt for Cool

For this blog post, we were supposed to conduct our own cool hunt. As I came into work this evening, I realized this and thought I was in trouble, since I hadn’t started my hunt yet. I then realized that my work environment would be the perfect locale for a cool hunt. I work in a computer lab under Camp Randall for student athletes. What better place to be immersed in cool than a place which is full of hip, trend starting, athletes. I noticed a quite a few things. Most of them like a good slouch when they sit. I suppose this gives off the feeling of comfort and relaxation. These both seem like very “cool” qualities to posses. Going along with that, many of the athletes wear sweats. While I’m sure this partly has to do with the ease of working out, I think it also goes along with the comfort and relaxation point. As in Gladwell’s article, many of the guy athletes wear the oversized leather boots. These have been around for a while, but seem to me to be in the fad category. They don’t seem too comfortable or practical. Many of the athletes also sport the backwards baseball cap with the flat brim. Rice talks about consumers using products in different ways than producers intended to make them cool. This is a perfect example. The main point of a baseball cap is to keep the sun out of your eyes. The curved brim helps with this. Turning the cap backwards makes it purely aesthetic and takes away its practical value. The flat brim only emphasizes this.

Gladwell also talked about diffusion and how “cool” spreads through culture to different people. While I wasn’t explicitly looking for this today, I saw a good example. While standing at a stoplight, waiting for the light to change, I saw a person move to the middle of the intersection, even though cars were still coming from the other direction. Sure enough, most everyone else waiting for the light to change went out into the middle of the street. While this doesn’t necessarily say anything about cool, it shows the point of diffusion, and that people are much more likely to do something if someone else does it first. This example shows that the same thing can happen in fashion or other areas of cool. If something new is seen on someone else, the trend will catch on. I’ve said it before, but group mentality is very interesting to me. It’s strange how we might do something or say something because someone else does or says it first, even though we’d normally never do it on our own. I guess it just goes to show that humans are a pack animal, and at times, we’ll go against what we think is right if everyone else is doing it too.