Welcome to the Age of the Nerds?

Photo by yat86

A recent article I read in Wired tells the story of a ship of nerds dubbed “Sea Monkeys” who take yearly cruises in celebration of everything nerdy and geeky. The author of the piece, a self-certified nerd, feels some discomfort with the proceedings. I’ll let you read it and parse those for yourself, but the one that struck me most was the not-so-simple question of what exactly is being celebrated. Wil Wheaton, who I of course really like, was aboard and apparently made clear his basic distrust of media, demanding that the reporter, “Get our culture right.” So a companion question to “What is being celebrated here?” might be, “What exactly is ‘nerd culture?'” And why, if it is worth celebrating in the first place, is it’s mention tinged with such bitterness even from those that espouse it?

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, beginning a sentence with the words from the Star Wars opening crawl would have qualified me as a huge, stinking pile o’ nerd. Cohosting a Star Trek podcast (OK, maybe an underground, short-wave radio gig back in the day, but I would’ve been like, 10) and occasionally deigning to wear my Ghostbusters t-shirt outside the house would have upped the nerd-ante considerably while substantially lowering my chances for a date. The upshot being, I guess, that nerds were supposedly outcasts. I, um, never felt that way, though. I just did what I did because I preferred it to other things like watching football ‘n stuff. I just found it more interesting, that’s all. I’m sure my having a physical handicap was part of it, but I never felt as if I was being a nerd in lieu of being a ‘normal’ person. I guess lots of other people did feel that way in the 70s and 80s, and that this feeling of being an outsider is a big part of what ‘nerd culture’ used to be. But, um, the Internet, conventions, and boat parties unite these people more than ever before, so that kind of destroys the “outsiders” argument, right?

So nerds feel like outsiders, not only because of who they are inside but because of the non-mainstream things they like, maybe? But alot of the properties mentioned in the article–Star Wars, Star Trek, BSG, etc. etc. are fairly mainstream now. Marvel, which was in its comic heyday when I was growing up, has exploded into something that everybody consumes rapturously. Adults are reading YA fiction all over the place, and old guys pour over shonen manga on the train. There is an online outlet for almost every geek-centered interest, so it would be hard to pin most things as “underground.” So there goes that argument.

So we might honestly say that nerd culture has indeed become the dominant culture, and not just in the US: Today I went to JumpFesta, a gathering near Tokyo celebrating one of the nerdiest manga companies around, Jump Comics. There you could see people of every type, from extreme cosplayers to average Suzukis, all come together to geek out over their favorite video games, anime and comics. By their sheer numbers, the groups that flock to these conventions are forces to be reckoned with, and businesses are doing their level best to reckon with them by giving them what they want. Nerds have serious power, folks, and I think that actually pisses some of them off. Hence the bitterness and the pining of oneself onto the above Nerd-o-gram because it makes you feel special or something.

We ain’t special anymore, and that’s OK.  As a happily-married guy who writes Star Wars quotes while wearing his Ghostbusters t-shirt outdoors and jams to ST podcasts, I must reiterate the premise that I floated during my review of the first Amazing Spiderman awhile back: The nerds have won. They (er, we, really) own the culture at this point. We should celebrate that, instead of being angry that we’re not actually nerds anymore.

Wizki

Tags: boat party, geek, JumpFesta, nerd, Star Trek, Star Wars, Wil Wheaton