A fad, sometimes called a trend, meme or a craze, is any form of behavior that develops among a large population and is collectively followed with enthusiasm for some period, generally as a result of the behavior's being perceived as novel in some way.[1] A fad is said to "catch on" when the number of people adopting it begins to increase rapidly. The behavior will normally fade quickly once the perception of novelty is gone.[1]
The specific nature of the behavior associated with a fad can be of any type including language usage, apparel, financial investment, and even food. Apart from general novelty, fads may be driven by emotional excitement, peer pressure, or even a desire to be outside social norms (counterculture Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. It is a neologism attributed to Theodore Roszak).[2]
Though the term trend may be used interchangeably with fad, a fad is generally considered a fleeting behavior whereas a trend is considered to be a behavior that evolves into a relatively permanent change.[3]
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Social impacts
Fads by their nature are temporary, but while many have only a negligible long-term impact on society, others can have dramatic effects, even long after the fads have ended.
A notable example of a perceived fad with a major long-term impact was the antisemitism Antisemitism is prejudice against or hostility towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, and/or religion. In its extreme form, it "attributes to the Jews an exceptional position among all other civilizations, defames them as an inferior group and denies their being part of the nation[s]" in which they in Europe and the Americas during the late 19th and 20th centuries. In the late 1800s this sentiment was described even by many in the Jewish communities as temporary "fad" and of little long-term concern.[4] Though relatively temporary, this sentiment led to events in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s that were far more serious than most could have anticipated. Though the endurance and impact of antisemitism may disqualify it as a fad, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to foresee this in the 19th century. As another example, in the United States during the 1950s, the beatnik Beatnik, a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s, was a synthesis of the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s into violent film images and a cartoonish misrepresentation of the real-life people and the spirituality found in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction. Kerouac spoke out against this movement became a major fad that died out as its original proponents abandoned the movement. Though this fad, in and of itself, was short-lived, it is credited with giving birth to the hippie The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s, swiftly spreading to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury movement in the following decade, and with inspiring other social trends in the decades that followed.[5]
See also
- Bandwagon effect The bandwagon effect, also known as the "cromo effect" and closely related to opportunism, is a phenomenon—observed primarily within the fields of microeconomics, political science, and behaviorism—that people often do and believe things merely because many other people do and believe the same things. The effect is often called herd
- Memetics Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, which was originated by Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter in the 1980s. It purports to be an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a gene, is an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour which is "hosted" in, which posits that ideas are subject to evolutionary pressure Any cause that reduces reproductive success in a proportion of a population, potentially exerts evolutionary pressure or selection pressure. With sufficient pressure, inherited traits that mitigate its effects - even if they would be deleterious in other circumstances - can become widely spread through a population. It is a quantitative analogous to that in population genetics Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of population subdivision and population structure. It attempts to explain such phenomena as adaptation and
- Peer pressure Peer pressure refers to the influence exerted by a peer group in encouraging a person to change his or her attitudes, values, or behavior in order to conform to group norms. Social groups affected include membership groups, when the individual is "formally" a member , or a social clique. A person affected by peer pressure may or may not
- List of Internet phenomena This is a list of phenomena specific to the Internet, such as popular themes and catchphrases, images, viral videos and more. Such fads and sensations grow rapidly on the Internet because its instant communication facilitates word of mouth. In the early days of the Internet, phenomena were primarily spread via email or Usenet discussion
Notes
- ^ a b Kornblum (2007), p. 213.
- ^ Domanski (2004), p. 147–159.
- ^ Arena (2001), p. 341.
- ^ Sparks (1899), p. 657.
- ^ Issitt (2009), p. 3.
References
- Arena, Barbara (2001). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Making Money with Your Hobby. Alpha. ISBN The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering (SBN) code created by Gordon Foster, now Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, for the booksellers and stationers W.H. Smith and others in 1966 978-0028638256. http://books.google.com/books?id=vTwLtB-gliwC.
- Domanski, Andrzej (2004). "Collective fascinations (fads) and the idea of ephemeral culture". Kultura i spoleczenstwo (Culture and society) 48 (4). http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?05PLAAAA00421032. (review/summary)
- Issitt, Micah L. (2009). Hippies: A Guide to an American Subculture. Greenwood. ISBN The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering (SBN) code created by Gordon Foster, now Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, for the booksellers and stationers W.H. Smith and others in 1966 978-0313365720. http://books.google.com/books?id=rVfRL_TpKb8C.
- Kornblum, William (2007). Sociology in a Changing World (8th ed.). Wadsworth Publishing. ISBN The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering (SBN) code created by Gordon Foster, now Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, for the booksellers and stationers W.H. Smith and others in 1966 978-0495096351. http://books.google.com/books?id=gjvC6gboyrkC.
- Sparks, Jared; Everett, Edward; Lowell, James Russell; Lodge, Henry Cabot (1899). The North American review. 168. New York: North American Review Publishing Co.. http://books.google.com/books?id=QVkCAAAAIAAJ.
External links
- Sency.com (the top 100 current trends on the web)
Categories: Popular culture Popular culture, or pop culture is the vernacular culture that prevails in a modern society. The content of popular culture is determined in large part by industries that disseminate cultural material, for example the film, television, and publishing industries, as well as the news media popular culture cannot be described as just the aggregate | Fads A fad, also known as a craze, refers to a fashion that becomes popular in a culture relatively quickly, remains popular, often for a rather brief period, then loses popularity dramatically, as it either fades into obscurity, or becomes a regular part of a society's culture |
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