Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity [Paperback]

Hal Niedzviecki (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2006

"Hal Niedzviecki is one of the wisest, funniest and most acute cultural critics writing today."—Naomi Klein, author of No Logo

Hal Niedzviecki has a blunt message for the army of tattoo and piercing enthusiasts, bloggers, skateboard warriors, and anyone else walking around with the smug certainty that they are one of a kind: Individuality is the new conformity.

Niedzviecki’s meditations touch on everything from designer religions to webcasts, from reality TV to the endless “everybody is a star” platitudes of global pop culture. The result is a smart, witty, and impassioned argument that shatters the you-can-do-anything pop myth and exposes the paradox of individualism.

Hal Niedzviecki is the founder of Broken Pencil magazine and the author of We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When nonconformity has become not only cool but also consumable, and everyone is told they are special, what happens to our definitions of rebellion and individualism? Are our real rebels against "conformist nonconformity" now the "neo-traditionalists" who exchange their individualism for membership in a community that offers meaning in backward-looking ideologies? These questions are pertinent but hardly original, and Niedzviecki's approach doesn't refresh the cultural debate. Niedzviecki (We Want Some Too) details lively examples from pop, consumer and counterculture—e.g., backyard wrestlers who assert their uniqueness while participating in mass culture; the "philosophy" brand of health and beauty products that sells its lotions with "moral maxims." But he molds these cases to fit his often predictable arguments: celebrity culture has been confused with individualism; the "semi-collapse" of traditional culture has led some to rebel by embracing orthodoxy; marketers have exploited ideals of individuality; and political activism is often just a way for protestors to "affirm their specialness." Falling short of a richer, more contradictory and more provocative analysis of these cultural items, Niedzviecki only grazes the surface of many of the issues Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism) and Thomas Frank (The Conquest of Cool) have already explored with depth and complexity. (May)
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Review

" . . . Niedzviecki is just like you -- a savvy cultural critic . . . part disillusioned memoir, part rant, part astute criticism . . . " -- Michael Leaverton, SF Weekly, May 2006

" . . . because of mass media’s infiltration into all aspects of our lives, everyone thinks they’re Special." -- Bookslut.com

"A blend of cultural analysis, reporting and memoir, Hello, I'm Special is full of sharp and funny observations..." -- Salon.com

"Equal parts Jerry Seinfeld and Thomas Frank... .Niedzviecki... gives us everything that makes his brand of literary genius so... 'special'." -- Tikkun Magazine

"Hal Niedzviecki... is one of the wisest, funniest and most acute cultural critics writing today." -- Naomi Klein, author of No Logo

"Niedzviecki holds a scalpel to this social monster with analytic precision that evokes Malcolm Gladwell . . . " -- Adrienne LaFrance, WBUR Boston, April 2006

"Niedzviecki's examinations yield fertile insights, without sounding overly pretentious." -- Gerry Donaghy, Powell’s Bookstore, May 2006

"Using case studies... the book links society's emphasis on celebrity to everything from anorexia to exorcisms." -- 7x7 Magazine

"Who will bear the burden of being dazzled by the wondrous presence of our countless wondrous individuals?" -- Paul Reidinger, San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 2006

"Witty and wise, part journalist, part theorist, Niedzviecki takes up two long-running American themes – conformity and individuality..." -- San Francisco Chronicle

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers (April 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872864537
• ISBN-13: 978-0872864535
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #955,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, culture commentator and editor whose work challenges preconceptions and confronts readers with the offenses of everyday life. He is the author of many books including the short story collection Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened and the nonfiction book The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. He is the current fiction editor and the founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts (www.brokenpencil.com). Hal's writing has appeared in newspapers, periodicals and journals across the world including the New York Times Magazine, Playboy, The Utne Reader, The Globe and Mail, the National Post, Toronto Life, Walrus, Geist, and This Magazine. Niedzviecki is committed to exploring the human condition through provocative fiction and non-fiction that charts the media saturated terrain of ever shifting multiple identities at the heart of our fragmenting age. He lives in Toronto.

Hal's web page: www.smellit.ca
Hal's Peep Culture blog: http://thepeepdiaries.com
Follow Hal on Twitter: http://twitter.com/halpen
Like Hal on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/HalNiedzvieckiwriter

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Ah, infotainment... October 21, 2006

By A. McFaul

Format:Paperback

I love infotainment reads, and this book is a good example of C+ quality in this genre. As I see it, this book sets out to characterize individuality as a value central to modern life, and does a great job of providing the reader of evidence of this again, and again, and again. By the last third of the book, it became a chore to hear the same argument rehashed with little elaboration.

The greatest downside to this book was that Niedzviecki implies throughout that valuing individuality as highly as he believes contemporary culture does is a bad thing, but absolutely fails to convince the reader on this point. Individuals interviewed by the author offer allusions to their "feeling lonely/disconnected/etc.," and this is the sum total of the evidence that the author is willing to supply to prove the negative effects of contemporary trends.

I think that the most effective thing that this book could do to improve itself is bring in empirical evidence and theory from psychology. A great wealth of discussion about the effects of media consumption on behavior, imitation, reward and punishment, etc. exist in psychology, and tying these lines of thought into "Hello, I'm Special" would have made this book better. The book, as it is, is pure journalism pretending to be cultural theory. (Here it is an ideal read if you like to say "hey, I could write this malarkey!" to yourself and close friends).

Up until the last forty or so pages, I was amused and getting a little bored. At about this point in the book, Niedzviecki decides that going without the conveniences of our cushy modern lives and actually "suffering" like real bushmen is the remedy to the problem of modern existence! So, to re-cap the author's argument: exposure to media leads to imitation, therefore we should all feel guilty for having running water. I can only assume that this derailed logic has its roots in the author's personal problems (e.g. I hate my life, therefore I want to hurt myself). Wow, a little juvenile and embarrassing for our cultural theorist, but I kept reainding. Right after giving Niedzviecki the benefit of the doubt big time, he then hits me with a combination condemnation/ laudatory hailing of "protesters" and "activists." I was like what is going on here? This dude failed to fully develop his pretty good initial argument/topic, so then just totally abandons it to discuss some irrelevant personal fascination of some other topic. The book, as compelling and fun to read as it was for the first 100 pages, became unreadable and I put it down with about 20 pages left to go.

Verdict: stoner rant.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Around and round we go May 28, 2006

By Thu Duong

Format:Paperback

Mr. Niedzviecki begins with an interesting subject: main stream culture has co-opted rebellion. The anecdotes and the witticisms are fine when he tones down on the condescension, but the book suffers from deep flaws.

He leaves terms such as pop culture and rebellion ill-defined. However, I gathered that main stream culture is something that the reader does not be a part of. Once he lays out his argument that the main stream has co-opted rebellion, his arguments loop endlessly between the wish to get away from pop culture and the inability to do anything that does not lead back to being pop culture. Instead of trying to find a third path out of his binary sorting of "pop vs rebel", his definitions broaden until his narrative becomes diffused and nearly directionless at points.

At several points, he touches on historical writing on individuality and masses, but fails to capitalize on these opportunities to deepen his argumnt or break the loop that he has built.

40 of 52 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy it unless you like being condescended to April 24, 2006

By Vegan Viking

Format:Paperback

Hal Niedzviecki is the guy who bums a ride with you and then criticizes the way you drive, tells you when to turn, and tells you where to park. He is the guy who walks into your kitchen and asks to be shown what you are cooking, and then makes unhelpful suggestions as to how to improve your recipe. He's the guy who crashes your party and makes snide comments about your taste in music, and how he was into it 'before they went all mainstream'. In short, he is a know-it-all ironic hipster killjoy.

The thesis of "Hello, I'm Special" isn't entirely clear: there is a vague sense of Niedzviecki complaining about the ubiquity of pop culture and how 'just being yourself' has been commercially appropriated, propped up sloppily by largely irrelevant quotations from academic figures like Foucault. Basically, anybody who tries to do anything 'different' is snidely and rather pettily criticized and scrutinized, from progessive Catholics, to Found Magazine founder Davy Rothbart, and the very people who trustingly gave Niedzviecki feedback. In fact, I am on his list of bumbling bourgeois wannabes simply by virtue of writing a review on Amazon (and no, this is not my attempt at earning 'glory' or 'fame'. I simply don't want anyone else to endure this book.).

Despite protestations in the introduction (following a lengthy retelling of his disaffected wealthy suburban youth, druggie days, various print accomplishments, and so on) that the book is not about him, the book is steeped in the context of Hal Niedzviecki: *I* received an email from so-and-so; participants in an alternative publishing event that *I* coordinated said; *my* friend did this; *I* think; *I* believe, etc. Niedzviecki constantly puts down and criticizes people and movements from the outside, without attempting to become involved or develop a personal understanding, and reserving none of this scathing judgement for himself (because publishing an interview with a male stripper who sodomizes himself with a cooked chicken is waaay more revolutionary than protesting the WTO).

As a result, the whole book smacks of sour grapes. Niedzviecki comes across as a disillusioned person who is overcome with jealousy that he is not the sole person in the universe capable of attempting nonconformity. Rather than criticize or act against the institutions and systems which appropriate nonconformity and create a homogenized world, he instead directs scorn towards people, mostly teens and young adults, who are simply rebelling in the only way they know how.

The one thing I learned from this book is how to assert yourself as a true individual: publish a book mercilessly slamming anyone and everything that has ever tried to do anything different, while constantly inserting yourself and your ego in the center of the action.