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Geek Culture Will Never Die...or Be Popular
adeelarshad82 writes "Last year CNN wrote an interesting article on how geek culture is now a big part of pop culture, while Patton Oswalt gave his own opinion on how he thinks pop culture has outright co-opted and diluted it. These articles gave birth to a completely different view, which is that geek culture can never truly be part of pop culture. The movies and t-shirts might sell, and everybody might use Facebook, but there will still be a small percentage that loves comics, imports video games, and can build their own computers. In other words, true geeks are much different from the stereotypes we learn about in the movies. The geek culture is not just playing D&D or watching V for Vendetta but also having a bookshelf full of D20 system manuals as well as reading all the Alan Moore material one can find. The fact of the matter is that while geek culture is far from dead, it's not exactly a part of the pop culture either. So, no matter hard media outlets try to make the concept catch on, no matter how many studios try to capitalize on the cultural waves of comic book movies and best-selling video games, there is no such thing as pop culture geekdom."
Well, first of all, geeks were hardly the early adopters of facebook.
Twitter, maybe. Facebook, no.
And when "all these people" are using -- nay, customizing -- Eclipse, then they will also be geeks.
Just because they've picked up the easy stuff, which geeks engineered to be easy to pick up, doesn't make them geeky.
NOBODY FUCKING CARES
Be yourself and stop with the labels. I build computers and I code in my spare time, I have a degree in chemistry and love science. I don't like anime, comic books, sci-fi, fantasty and have never played D&D. I played sports in high school.
Am I a geek? No. Am I a jock? No. I'm me. Fuck off with the labels.
Gone!
I didn't slog through a future ruled by mutant-hating Sentinels, storm the beaches of Klendathu and brave the Three Terrors of the Fire Swamp so that some kid could pick up Halo and call himself a geek.
When my party came back from the Temple of Elemental Evil, they spat on me.
Pop culture has co-opted nearly everything worth while from geek culture and moved on. That is what pop culture does once a sub-culture achieves critical mass. In my life time it has happened twice. The first was with raves/electronica/underground dance music. The second was with computers/internet/geeks. In both cases the sub-cultures went from being isolated, to being referenced in 'popular' ways (techno music in commercials, "rave" fashion on television, companies deciding employees need email, grandma wanting to be on AOL).
The acceptance of computers in popular culture was the biggest change. For raves, even when they were "big" it was still very much a sub-culture. There are only so many people who are ever going to get into heavy bass and recreational drug use. On the other hand computers have leapt from the point where "nobody" (from a pop-culture perspective) wanted to use them, to the point where "everybody" has at least one. Of those who have computers, only a small percentage actually care how they work. The rest just have them because they need one to function in society. That is the co-opting that took place.
In a more subtle way, society's perspective of IT has shifted. In the late 1990s and early 21st century (before the tech bubble exploded), I used to get recognition from strangers for being in IT. It was one of those jobs where people didn't know much about it, but it sounded cutting edge and cool. Society knew they needed to know how to use computers, so being out ahead of the curve was an advantage. Now IT people are just the work place bitches, a rung or two above the mailroom guys (unless you work for a technology company).
At the end of the day, you should still be nice to geeks, because they will probably manage you one day.
That's the geek equivalent of the jocks who think it's ok to do poorly in school, because they'll just go pro. The odds are stacked against you, but it makes for a compelling fantasy.