Geek Culture Lives On
Back in early December 2010, I posted an entry over at deviantArt detailing what I believed to be the loneliness of geekhood. As irony would have it, an article by Patton Oswalt surfaced on the Internet just a few weeks later entitled: "Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die". It's an interesting read. Oswalt describes his geekery-rich adolescence, in which he and his friends obsessed over certain factions of fantasy and scifi, over comic books and graphic novels, over D&D and Monty Python.
Admittedly, he says, there’s a chilly thrill in moving with the herd while quietly being tuned in to something dark, complicated, and unknown just beneath the topsoil of popularity. Something about which, while we moved with the herd, we could share a wink and a nod with two or three other similarly connected herdlings.
Now the truth is, that doesn't feel too different from how I live now. But Oswalt disagrees...
Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun. The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling.
The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet.
He's got a point. He's got a very valid point, actually. But the irony, as I mentioned earlier, lies in the fact that my journal entry had expressed an almost entirely opposite observation about geek culture. I'll draw from it a bit here, and also expand on what I had originally written:
In an age when geekery has turned a corner and become almost hip, it's remarkable how often I am plunged into the murky depths of non-geekery. The word itself - geek - is almost entirely misunderstood by non-geeks even to this day. They assume the words geek, nerd, and dork are interchangeable. Not so. Check out this handy venn diagram:
(courtesy of Great White Snark)
Ah, I see they even managed to fit "dweeb" in there.
If you don't happen to be any of these things (in which case you must have stumbled onto my site by mistake and are quickly looking for a way out), does this help?
While this diagram does a pretty good job of setting the stage, let me explain a bit further in regards to nerds and geeks. While intelligence is shared by both, nerds are way more obsessed with academics and might very well have a higher IQ than the standard geek. A nerd will often use scientific/mathematical words and terminology, while a geek will make obscure references that will be lost on a non-geek. For example:
Nerd dialogue: I can recite pi to the 100th digit.
Geek dialogue: There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.
Now let's get into geek culture. The type of obsession most often attributed to the geek is SciFi/Fantasy, which includes movies, books, TV shows, comics, video games, and RPGs. But obsessions for geeks are certainly not limited to SciFi/Fantasy. Geeks are widely known to obsess over any type of literature and film, theatre, computers, techy stuff, art, any division of science, mythology, and British comedy troupes...to name just a few.
And yet, with all this information readily at hand, non-geeks still tend to define geeks in the following way:
geek [geek]
noun Slang .
- A socially inept, generally unattractive person with a high IQ who probably wears glasses, suspenders, and/or a pocket protector; spends way too much time with computers; loves Star Wars or Star Trek. Synonymous with "nerd".
- A carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, such as biting off the head of a live chicken.
Actually, no, probably ONLY a geek or a nerd would even know the second (and original) definition. But as for the top one, that's essentially it. And I know this from personal experience. When I've told non-geeks that I am, in fact, quite the geek, I've gotten responses that helped to create the above definition. I think my favorite response was: "But...you're not ugly."
My experience with non-geekery doesn't end there.
For many years now, I have bounced around jobs in multiple programs within the same health center, and each one did a very good job of securing my "wow, you're not one of us - please stay in your corner" status. Let's start at the administration building, at which I temporarily worked reception. I suppose word had spread that I ultimately wanted to make a career out of writing, and one of the program directors came up to me one day and asked what kind of a writer I wanted to be. I said I wanted to be a novelist, and she asked what sorts of novels.
"Fantasy," I said.
She stared at me for a moment with a crease between her eyebrows, then ventured, "...there's not really a market for that, is there?"
I honestly do not remember what I said. I only remember laughing hysterically inside. I think, for a moment, I almost thought she was joking. And then I saw how the expression on her face did not change - she was very clearly concerned over my wasting time writing in a genre no one ever reads. (By the way, this exchange occurred not long after Return of the King won the Oscar for Best Picture, and the first 5 Harry Potter books were busy making J.K. Rowling one of the richest people in the world.)
While this was undoubtedly the most hilarious response I've ever gotten after revealing my genre of choice, it certainly wasn't the only confused one. "How do you mean?" is something I've been asked more than once, and my description of alternate worlds with magic and fantastic creatures leaves them staring blankly. It's not just that they seem to have never heard of such a genre, it's that they're dumbfounded at a grown person choosing to write that kind of stuff.
Does the SciFi/Fantasy section in bookstores have a cloaking device through which no one can see other than SciFi/Fantasy readers? I mean, it's right there, usually somewhere alongside standard fiction and almost always neighbors with the Romance section. And it's not a tiny, easily overlooked section either. It usually boasts a set of shelves chock full of new releases, resplendent in their colorful, hardcover glory.
Okay, let's leave that mystery behind for now and fast forward several years to my current job, which is a children's program. Once a week, we have a staff meeting which includes client updates. During one of these meetings, a clinician was talking about a client of hers, and she mentioned how he was playing with one of those "light swords" from Star Wars. Then she asked, "What are those things called?"
Despite giving allowance to the fact that I've lived a geekier life than most, it was baffling for me to accept that someone wouldn't know that term. I mean, hasn't that word existed in pop culture long enough for a non-fan to know it? Jesus, I knew Captain Kirk's ship was called the Enterprise years before I started watching Star Trek. Wasn't this roughly the same thing?
"Lightsabers," I responded, but no one heard me.
Across the table, another clinician said, "Oh, they're called Life Savers." Then she threw her hands up and said: "I know! NERD!"
Wow. She referred to herself as a nerd (and yes, please see the chart/explanation above to understand her mistake in terminology) for knowing a pop culture term that has existed since 1977. Except that she got it wrong. Which makes her about as far from a geek (the term she should have used) as is humanly possible. Now, I might have misheard her - she might have said "light" instead of "life", but I definitely heard the "savers" part right. Which still makes it very, very sad. Even sadder is the fact that no one corrected her.
I just sat there feeling like an alien who had beamed into this conference room full of unfamiliar beings...beings who would look at me oddly if I happened to mention how cool it is that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside or how I'm a bit nervous that the stars might be right soon. And that brought the familiar loneliness that sweeps over me whenever I recognize that I am indeed alone in a sea of non-geeks. Actually, I'm in that sea more often than not. I'm lucky to have a very geeky husband and a couple of very geeky friends. But in a world that appears, at the moment, to be overflowing with geeks, it's amazing that I meet so few of them outside the Internet. And girl geeks, like myself, seem to be virtually non-existent.
I'll wrap this up with a little anecdote. It happened just recently, in fact. I was out with friend of mine (we've been friends for almost 18 years at this point), and while she doesn't happen to be a geek, we are great friends nevertheless. She was talking about how a recent job assignment required her to research some information about an on-line RPG, which she knew nothing about. She was so lost that she was on the verge of calling me or my husband, because, and I'll try to recount what she said as closely as I can...
"...I knew you two might actually have known what this thing was, because you're both so, well, you're into those kinds of things, but no, I'm not saying that you're, I mean...I wouldn't ever refer to you as..."
"Geeks?" I asked.
"Yeah, but of course you're not geeks, and I would never call you that. I hope you know that."
Even now, in this day and age, one of my best friends shied away from calling me a geek because she assumes the term is derogatory and insulting. Just for added measure, she stumbled over the term "Dungeons and Dragons" in the same conversation, calling it: "Dragons and...what is it?" She knows my husband has a D&D group, but she doesn't really know what that is.
These are not isolated incidents with very specific people who somehow miss all this stuff. I see these people all the time. They are friends, co-workers, family members and more. They make up huge sections of the population. And it's not that they're fond of geeky stuff on a superficial level or even that they notice it and dismiss it because they're uninterested. They don't see it at all, just like muggles don't notice the wizarding community all around them. And if you try to explain even a little bit of geekery to them, they won't understand you. You may as well be speaking Klingon. (They don't know what Klingon is either.)
Your essay was very well-written and carefully thought out, Mr. Oswalt, and I get everything you were trying to say. But I think if you look closely, you'll see that geek culture isn't even close to dying. Not even the Internet could kill it. We will continue to thrive and flourish in our strange little underground world with endless bookshelves, every video game console known to man in our media centers, and They Might Be Giants playing in the background.