Quote:
Originally Posted by jadis
For the sake of the argument: in a certain sense we're all posers. Social behavior involves externalizing and codifying certain things into signs others can read. And as long as we *have* to do all that, doesn't it make sense to construct our social selves around the things we actually care about, like a shared taste for Siouxsie and the Banshees?
I guess what happens then is certain people who only have a superficial appreciation of Siouxsie and the Banshees (the look) glomming onto the community and ruining everything? The actual posers as opposed to posers in the wide and abstract sense I proposed above? People who favorite SATB song is Face to Face?
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I agree that we're all posers in the strict sense you describe. Which people I consider 'actual' posers isn't necessarily about depth of appreciation, I think. What makes someone a poser is more artificial than superficial; I mean building an external identity in a calculating way, in order to be perceived a certain way (beyond just trying to find people with similar interests), to an extent that it's annoying to other people. In that way, if someone really likes one single greatest hit of a band but really loves them for that and genuinely wants to wear their shirt out of enthusiasm, then I'm cool with that. And conversely, I think that if someone knows their stuff about something and really likes it, but their main motive for identifying with it is to seem interesting or smart, then they're a poser. But of course it's a floating scale and almost everyone is guilty of that to at least a small degree