Of course, when you start realizing that there’s precious little difference between role playing games and fantasy football leagues, well….

Geek culture can be as stereotypical as they make jock culture out to be, but in the end are they really like they say they are. Subcultures are populated with people that are interested in certain things and others who are looking for interests.

My whole life I’ve seen that there is no such thing as jocks or geeks or sluts, only people that want to or are forced into that role.

We all just people stereotypes don’t exist. We just wish they did.

Yes, but he’s also the guy who saves the day–and who the team relies on to save the day–more often than not. Don’t forget that Stargate also brought us Daniel Jackson, a geeky, stuttering Egyptologist who has saved the universe AND gotten the girl on numerous occasions.

Awesome post, regardless, and very well said.

I was thinking of a Golden Age as acceptance of and access to a great amount of quality of a culture’s byproducts. Has there been any time within the last 100 years where Geekdom has such a great influence upon society? Before that, during the late Victorian age lots of people obsessed with obscure orchards, the taxonomy of unknown species found in foreign lands and rare books (I’d brand those as geek activities). That is the last time that I can think of that “geekiness” had such wide acceptance.

By it’s very nature, geeks will not be the cultural norm for entire populations and we’ll have a lot further to go before intellectual horsepower is given the respect it deserves. But, by gosh by golly, it’s pretty good to be a geek nowadays and the future looks even brighter.

Oh, and for those of you who are interested in the semantic differences, here’s a Nerd vs. Geek vs. Dork quiz for ya: http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=9935030990046738815

We celebrate physical excellence with the Olympics, professional sports, the World Cup. We celebrate artistic ability with concerts that cost $150 per ticket, public sculpture, and arts fairs. We celebrate intellectual excellence with Chuck on NBC and Stargate Atlantis on SciFi.

And even on Stargate Atlantis, the two coolest members of the team are uber-soldier Ronin and Colonel Sheppard, the jockish soldier who would rather play golf than chess or attend the Atlantis Mensa meetings. Rodney McKay, the main character with the most overt intelligence, is arrogant, overweaning, emotionally screwed up, and generally a bad stereotype of smart people everywhere.

There’s a big difference between understanding the need for someone smart to figure things out that you don’t get yourself and appreciating them for simply being smart.

There’s also a difference, in this case, between being a “geek” and a “nerd.” Nerds are smart, geeks are both smart and have personal interests that are outside the norm for our culture – like my LEGO scale modeling and role-playing game interests.

On the other hand I was always emotionally and socially insecure, my smarts were above the curve and I enjoyed the company of nerds. Knowing your family Brian, take some comfort in their support of your intellectual muscle. My mom still has video tapes of every single sports game I played, but by family collectively knocked me down for using “scientific” words. (You know, the ones with more than a couple of syllables.) So, I enjoyed being a “social chameleon” as I called myself, someone who could blend in and hide in many different settings.

But I disagree that we are living in a monolithic jock culture. On the contrary, I believe that we are living in the Golden Age of the Geek. Think about popular culture: With Lord of the Rings winning the Oscar, a constant rotation of at least one comic book figure in every megaplex in the country, from Buffy to Harry Potter exercising our collective imagination, geek is the new black. And it’s dawning on the world that it is going to be the geeks that will save the world’s ass. Back during WWII it was the jocks who the nation turned to defeat tyranny. Now we all look to the geeks’ imagination, ingenuity and intelligence to wean the world off of the slow-acting poison of long-chained carbon. To paraphrase Paul Simon, “Al Gore, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

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But this double life meant I was neither quite a geek or a jock (oh yeah, I was in the marching band, too). I’ll always remember one of my baseball teams, where I was openly mocked for being a brainiac. By a punk whose batting average was as least .200 points lower than mine and who may by now have worked his way up shift leader at McDonald’s. And then imagine being in a PhD program and having people find out that I had always seen myself as an athlete to a significant degree.

Not quite fitting anywhere has made me a better person, I think. To this day I have a lot of different things going on and I have friends – GOOD friends – across a range of subcultures. Writers, jocks, geeks, gamers, musicians, academics, you name it. Professionally I’m a marketing guy with a lot more engineer friends than marketing friends. Don’t see that every day.

Great post. Confession is good for the soul…