Sulkyblue's Blog

Have a look at this video: http://geekadvancement.com/
"The reality is, while geek seems to be the new chic and is spreading its wings in the land of mainstream culture, us native geeks are still a misunderstood community. What better time to share with the world what we are really all about!" (from their about page)

I came across this via Wil Wheaton's blog post:

After watching the video yesterday, I was impressed by the production values, and I thought it was really awesome that it was just one small part of a larger project. I love that the whole thing is supposed to encourage literacy (if you really look for the links) and intends to support a good cause. As a writer, I certainly want more people to be readers!

But as I watched it a second and a third time, something didn't feel quite right to me. I couldn't put my finger on it, until e-mail started flooding in from people who could: this was supposed to be about refuting stereotypes and celebrating the things we love, but it ends up feeling like we're trying to convince the Cool Kids that we're really just like them, and a promotional opportunity for celebrities who don't know a damn thing about our geek culture, and don't care about the people who create and live in it.

I agreed with Wil's initial response (I don't know how to refer to him - Mr Wheaton, @wilw, the esteemed gentleman?), I thought it was a nice little video - well made, funny and cute. But it didn't really sit right with me for some reason. So I re-watched it 10 or 12 times.

The first thing that struck me was it started out in negative terms, with people saying what they *don't* do and implying that the things they don't do are sad and pathetic. "I DON'T play D&D or Magic the Gathering" and Wil's own "I speak python and css, not Klingon". Both seem to be trying a bit too hard to distance the New Geek from the old school Geek. They say "this is what geeks are seen to be, this is what people think they do... but we don't do that". It's as someone saw that geeks were about to become cool and that the cool kids should therefore want to be geeks. But then remembered they'd been mocking geeks for years so they must simultaneously embrace the cool while distancing from the pathetic.

I re-watched it yet again, and realised my core objection... the opening screen defines geek as:
- A person who is interested in technology, especially computing and new media
- who has chosen concentration rather than conformity
- one who passionately pursues skill and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance

But they don't talk about that in the video, they're not talking about being geeks, they're talking about being a subsection of geek - social media junkies. Being a geek is about more than twittering, podcasting, and using facebook. What makes Stephen Fry a geek isn't that he twitters, it's that he's interested in technology and ideas and he twittered EARLY. Ashton Kutcher and MC Hammer may twitter, but it doesn't make them geeks.

To embrace the life you need to do more than just use the tools. One of the people says "Just because you own a Nintendo wii, does not make you a geek". Well just 'cos you have a twitter account doesn't make you a geek either. As sammoore said when we were discussing this concept "using twitter to keep on top of your personal productivity system which brings together google calander, remember the milk and the moleskin notebook in your pocket is being the geek". Telling me you're getting on a plane to New York does not qualify you.

Being a geek is about using twitter because it's interesting, not because it's popular. It's about finding xkcd funny and scarily accurate. It's about a heartfelt discussion about Manic Miner, Elite or Pong. It's about wanting an iphone, or an eee, or a smaller, faster doodad despite the fact that your current large clunky doodad fulfills the actual need. It's about getting lost in ThinkGeek for 20 minutes when all you wanted was a link to illustrate a point. It's about spending 3 hours re-watching a video and writing a blog post on why it annoys you.

I think this is a classic example of a project starting out cool with a focused message and then gradually getting more and more muddled. I'm sure most of the people in that video really are true geeks, but it doesn't come across terribly well with that edit and script. They lost sight of the core message somewhere along the way and once it's gone it's very hard to fight it back.