Speak out with your geek out - WTF?

[dreamshark]

"Join Speak Out with your Geek Out: Take a stance against baiting nerd rage and stereotypes of geeks."

This is a joke, right? Is there really anybody that believes that in 2011, geeks are an oppressed minority that need defending? Geekery these days is as mainstream as NASCAR, except a lot more (dare I say it?) privileged. Now that the Star Wars franchise has extracted every possible penny from the pocketbooks of the American public, crowd-pleasing summer movies are all about comic book superheroes, and half the shows on television are sci-fi or fantasy. Video and online gaming is a multi-million dollar industry. Everybody's grandma is now online playing Farmville. And the richest man in the world is a classic geek, fr god's sake.
If you want to defend an unappreciated, butt-of-all-jokes minority, how about English majors?

Comments

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it struck me as pretty ridiculous too. Fandom won the culture wars decades ago; we're just lucky all of them haven't flooded the conventions yet. ~_^

[mle292.livejournal.com]

No. Geeks are not oppressed.

It started because some hack internet journalist went on a date with a man that she met via an internet dating site. On the date, she found out that he was a Magic: The Gathering champion.

She went home to blog about how filled with indignation she was to have endured the hardship of going to meet someone who did not share her interests, but she specifically chided all people who enjoy geeky things.

As I understand, the blogger got lots of attention (mostly negative) and lots of ad revenue. The "Speak out with your geek out" posts are an attempt to make the act of chiding geeks just for being geeks less socially acceptable.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

The "Speak out with your geek out" posts are an attempt to make the act of chiding geeks just for being geeks less socially acceptable.

Yeah. I'd rather chide geeks for being so mainstream and predictable.

I do kinda feel for the English majors, though.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'd rather chide geeks for being so mainstream and predictable.

...not to mention gullible. The original article smacks of trolling.

[quadong.livejournal.com]

Being a geek is mainstream if you count liking Star Wars as being a geek, but not if you count wanting to do calculations about the actual technical challenges of space travel.

Since the world has decided that the word "geek" just means someone who is interested in something (otherwise, I would not hear people calling themselves "motorcycle geeks" and other such nonsense), then by that definition, geeks don't need defending.

But if by geek we mean the same personality type as used to exclusively get the label "geek" (or "nerd" or whatnot, depending on the year and location), then I think those people still need defending. They just don't seem to have a name anymore.