I recently read these two articles on Cracked.com, which is both suspiciously informative and highly NSFW. Anyway, these articles are proposing that the term "nerd" or "geek" is being outdated in these modern times because all the things that used to be associated with these words is now "cool" and "mainstream" and "pop culture". And before the hundreds of you spam the comments with how "nerd" is different from "geek" and post links to their etymologies, I'm going to start here by saying that I'll be using the terms interchangably, since they (used to) have the same general connotation, i.e. in that you were a social misfit because of certain reasons, like having a collection or being a gamer or basically being a fan of anything that was not mainstream.
If you examine some of the social and technological explanations put forth by the articles of why this change has come about in modern culture, it makes a lot of sense. The era these words were thrown about was a time where money was paramount, and that getting a house and a car and a girlfriend were the most important things in life. There were no computers in those days, not the computers we know of; and there was certainly no Internet. People were ostracized for having an unconventional hobby, or for valuing something that wasn't valued by the majority.
It's all different now. Technology has changed a lot of things. The Internet connects like-minded people together now in ways never before seen. And when companies realised that there was such a large population of people willing to part with their money for obscure things that they could mass-produce, the economies of scale just racked up. Intelligence isn't a minority anymore - you need some brains to operate all the technology around you (though the world is still full of idiots). Things that used to be exclusive to a small group of enthusiasts are now being introduced into the mainstream media, being pop culture.
A lot of you may wonder why I'm writing about this phenomenon, because how can it be a bad thing? People who used to be ostracised and shunned and excluded now have their interests shared by a large majority of like-minded people! It's like Hitler announcing that Judaism was "quite cool" and having a bunch of Nazis come over to your bar mitzvah in their yarmulke and shouting along while you say "Oy vey". You are not reviled or hated anymore, but are one of many; how can that be bad?
I put forth two reasons why the world isn't as straightforward or wonderful as that. The first is quite understandable: geeks and nerds still exist. There are still people who are ostracised for liking things which are not mainstream. One example that comes immediately to mind is anime in Singapore (and Japan, for that matter, but let's keep things within our borders). It's still being shunned by a lot of the outside world for a lot of the same reasons comic books were shunned back in the day. Though its followers are growing in numbers, they are still generally perceived as reclusive peverts who would rather indulge in "cartoon" girls than "real" girls. It's not even that anime is more risque or explicit than other types of media - Hollywood has been sexing it up for years - but it's just not common enough yet to enter any kind of national consciousness.
I have very few problems with people who like specific things: games, anime, guitar, sewing, high-altitude skydiving - I mean, whatever makes you happy, right? What I do find sad about these people is that they are usually fanatically devoted to their area of interest, but are woefully ignorant in a lot of other areas. I guess this is more of a personal thing: I prefer to be a jack of all trades, to dabble in all knowledge, whether it be psychology or pop culture, because knowing a bit about everything means that you'll never be stuck in conversation with another person. And a lot of humour nowadays is pop culture and, as a comedian, I strive to know about my world and all the funny relationships between everything in it. So it really saddens me that some people don't know who George Clooney or Anne Hathaway is - like, you don't have to obsessively follow every tabloid and stalk every TMZ news-site and rattle off the list of actors and actress who have won an Emmy three times - but it never hurts to know a bit about everything.
The second reason why the world isn't a better place now that nerdism is mainstream is because nerdism still isn't. Not in the way that it was ostracised in the past. Even though a lot of ideas have filtered into mainstream media, the inherent nature of pop culture is that it has to cater to the masses, which usually involves a lowest common denominator of some kind so that the most number of people can like or understand it. Everything is watered down. I think the Internet has to take some of the blame here: by reducing our attention spans to only process the most repeated short bursts of information, the market for quick, compartmentalised entertainment is the market right now.
I watched The Dark Knight Rises yesterday, and at the end of the movie I was just mindblown. As a comics fan for almost a decade now, I thought Christopher Nolan's vision of the classic characters was fantastic, and as a fan of good storytelling I thought his trilogy capstone was jusy bloody brilliant. And as I'm sitting there in the theatre watching the credits roll, taking deep breaths to calm the blown-away feeling, I realise that none of the people now streaming out of the cinema will ever get the full effect of what I was feeling then, that same level of "holy-crap-that-was-awesome" that defined that movie for me. Because I knew the lore. I knew what all the characters represented and symbolised before I stepped into that dark hall, and I knew their relationships and their true identities, and somehow the big reveal and plot twist in the end was so much more meaningful to me as a comics fan, than it would probably be for someone who is just watching it to see Batman punch the crap out of a bunch of thugs. Comic books are still not mainstream; comic book movies are.
Here's the thing: I don't want to come across as a snob, that just because I know more about the comic book history I am better than you in any way. That's not what I was feeling at all. I actually want to know how to transmit that feeling into more people, people who have never picked up a comic book before and who might do so now. Because that feeling is one of the best feelings in the world, and I don't deserve to be the only one to have it.
Geeks get the girls,
The Edna Man
No comments:
Post a Comment