This thesis forms a sociological investigation of the ‘hipster’ subculture that has grown in importance in recent years. Using the methodology of semiotic analysis, it examines the trends and themes shown by the images that hipsters post on the microblogging website Tumblr, as well as analysing hipster journalism, texts and companies. This communication is conceptualised with reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality in order to show that hipsters communicate in a way that distorts the perception of real space and results in the abstraction of the meaning of ideas like “global” and “local”. It also explores the importance of secret knowledge in a community that manages to be both secretive and extremely open, comparing this example with the historical case of the Beat Generation, who hipsters have adopted as their progenitors, and discusses how their influence drives the hipster to view the world as a literary text to be re-read and re-interpreted.

This research address the topic of hipster phenomenon and its discursive manifestations in the online magazine VICE. The theoretical part of the thesis submits the basic discursive frameworks which serve as a theoretical anchoring for the practical part based on discursive analysis of the articles. The analysis itself is based on 11 articles mainly from the section ​Remembering the Hipster, ​which was chosen as the most appropriate for this study. The aim of the thesis is to explore the main discursive manifestations of hipster culture in those articles and to find out, whether those reproduced manifestations overlap with identified categories from the theoretical part, or whether they differ from each other. The main purpose of this analysis is then to find out what does it mean to be ​hipster according to VICE magazine contributors.