By the end of the 20th century, postmodernism had already started shaping culture and popular tastes in unprecedented ways. With the turn of the century came the widespread use of the internet and the rise of social media which in turn further affected the way popular culture manifested itself within the youth. This paper aims to explore the effects of social media on youth subcultures and niche aesthetics, especially those that rose to prominence alongside Web 2.0. Examples include the ‘dark academia’, ‘cottagecore’, and ‘coquette’ aesthetics, or trends like ‘clean girl’, ‘VSCO girl’, etc. The focus shall be on the death of monoculture and the rise of diverse taste communities on the internet, arguing that the decentralisation of culture, facilitated by the fragmentation of the digital landscape, has fostered a pluralistic environment where these niche subcultures and micro aesthetics flourish. These aesthetics and subcultures existing within a capitalist framework lead to a characteristic sense of hyperindividualism and hyper-compartmentalization of identity, which shall be explored in the context of theories of identity formation.



By exploring the concepts of the digital space, identity formation, and the commodification thereof in light of the work of theorists like Zygmunt Bauman and Jean Baudrillard, this paper aims to reach a multifocal understanding of the complex interplay between cultural democratisation and economic exploitation of self-expression in the digital era. This shall be done via analysis of pre-, transitory, and post-digital age youth subcultures to foreground the influence of social media.