Informal Research, HW 27

If you're looking for an easy way to ingest the dominant perspective on being cool, there's an easy media to turn to; literature. Specifically, teenage literature. No other group is as overtly concerned with coolness and being cool as adolescents. They have nothing really substantial to worry about most of the time and so they try to fill the vacuum with nonsensical concepts of coolness and flattery.

Seemingly in spite of this, cool fiction arises to suit the demographic.

A personal favorite author of mine, Ned Vizzini, wrote a book that initially seemed to challenge the dominant view of coolness, but still wound up coming back to a different dominant idea: being yourself. (It seems more and more like a disney-esque cliche). His book Be More Chill describes the stereotypically uncool teen as he tries to drop his uncool habits and become socially accepted. Unique to the otherwise typical story is the inclusion of a device known as a squip, an ingest-able supercomputer designed to literally make you more popular, to increase your social standing. In addition, it can write your papers for you, help memorize lines in a play, and give you the answers to questions as they come at you.

If you enjoy teen-angsty fiction, this is a good pick, though I would sooner recommend one of Vizzini's other works, "Teen Angst.....Nah" or "It's Kind of a Funny Story", the latter of which is one of my favorite all-time books.