Summary of Chapter 7: "The Social Self of Cool"

In many ways cool is the cousin of sexy. It is in some ways the male equivalent of sexy. Sure, guys can be sexy and girls can be cool, but you'll hear sexy more often attached to females and cool to males. Like sexy, cool is just as mysterious and hard to pin down. It is used to describe an inordinate number of situations, objects, people, and activities. Never before has a word been so often used but so hard to define. And just as our culture promises those who master the sexy social self a meaningful and fulfilling life, the same is promised to those who can master the cool persona.

The story of cool begins in a very different place than we might imagine. Three of the most common cool expressions - "That's hip," "I dig that", and "That's cool" - have their origins in African tribal culture, specifically in the Yoruba and Ibo cultures of West Africa. As cool moved beyond those who understood its original ethos, it began to change. No longer was it simply a tool of dignity and survival; it became a way of defining yourself as an adolescent growing up in the midst of modern social alienation. It didn't take long for marketers to realise how much money could be made from exploiting young people's desire to find identity through cool.

Cool became a way of being seen. It moved from an attitude to an aesthetic. Hollywood, rock 'n' roll and a booming consumer market ensured that cool became the perfect social mask to wear in an age in which media was beginning to dominate social consciousness. This version of cool is exactly the same as sexy; both are all about being watched. As people became less defined by their contribution to society and by their pasts, the new media landscape was all about producing the right image. Cool was a performance. Today, as we are so used to seeing the public performance, we no longer question it. Yet a closer examination of cool reveals fascinating insights into who we wish to be.

Cool offers middle-class people a chance to escape their self-consciousness and to be comfortable and affluent. The teenager from the leafy green, well-to-do suburb can, with a flick of his cap and a pair of baggy pants, take on the gangster persona in an attempt to have the street cred of the ghetto rub off on him. The performance of cool offers the social actor the benefits of imitating a cultural outsider without any of the social cost. Cool gives those who feel entrapped by the normality and conformity of modern mass culture a chance to escape into a fantasy world of false danger and fake rebellion. Meanwhile, beneath the surface we can find a deep desire to discover or rediscover personal authenticity.

Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.65-73