That's Just Insipid!

The term "hipster" derived from the slang term "hip" meaning "in the know." As with any social stereotype, there is a healthy disdain for hipsters, even by other hipsters themselves. And also, as with any stereotype, the term "hipster" has varying meanings. It seems that, more than anything else qualifying one as a hipster, having and wielding some kind of nascent cultural knowledge is the essence of hipsterdom. Curiously, there is a hierarchy at work, wherein an individual encounters information about the world around him or her (particularly in the domain of the arts) and then spends it like a currency. This spending affords him or her greater and greater confidence and status as a hipster. Even more curiously, an individual indentifies those around him or her as either more or less hip, creating a scale of cool in which all information possessed by those hipper is attractive, exciting, and fresh whereas all information parroted by those below is deemed spent, lame, or "sold-out."Through this process, culture is digested.