What maketh a geek? Is it a collection of number one issue comic books in plastic wrap? Is it a working knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons? Is it a reading history that includes Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series? A vast memory of Star Trek trivia? Boba Fett anyone?
What makes a geek and are you one?
Apt. 11d 
Considering the title of my blog . . . yeah, I’m a geek. For me, it’s an interest in video games, technology, and lots of books. I drool over new gadgets. That’s a bit geeky, I think. I think there are different kinds of geeks. I consider myself a techno-geek. But there are gaming geeks, comic geeks, anime geeks, sci-fi geeks, literature geeks, movie geeks. And on and on.
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I qualify on all of the above and I’m a self-identified geek. I think geekdom is less in the concrete details of what you know or are obsessed about and more in the sense of alienation that accompanies that interest.
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I had a long conversation once with a friend about what constitutes a “geek.” Our conclusion was that geeks are people who, at a point in their life when they presumably should have been interacting with the majority of their peer group and thereby learning valuable social skills, instead focused their attention on some distracting technology/body of literature/way of life/etc., and thus missed out on internalizing all sorts of social cues. (This is the “alienation” Ancarett mentions.) Hence, geeks don’t dress/talk/act like the majority of their peer group, because they never learned how, and this marks them. Now maybe this doesn’t work anymore, since a kind of geek fashion/chic has emerged over the past decade or so, but it makes some sense, I think.
Technically, this would mean practically anything could be a source of geekhood. You could have been a band geek in high school, or a debate geek, or a politics geek, or a baseball geek, etc. In actual practice though, there are lots of potential obsessions which can easily find a place in the mainstream adolescent/teen-age/young adult world, and so don’t result in geekhood. And this changes. When I was a kid, knowing a lot about personal computers made you a geek. Obviously, that’s no longer the case.
As for my markers, let’s see…comic books in plastic wrap packed away in the storage closet? Check. Working knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons? Check (I only finally gave away all my D&D stuff four or five years ago). A reading history that includes Asimov’s Foundation series? Actually, I didn’t read that until a couple of years ago–but don’t get me started on Tolkien. A vast memory of Star Trek trivia? Well, my brother and I used to have contests to see how quickly we could identify a given Original Series episode (the key is all in the color of the planet the Enterprise was seen orbiting in the first few seconds, and which way it was orbiting it). Boba Fett? I burned out on Star Wars pretty early, so I was never into him.
Is blogging still a minority enough activity so as to be geeky on its own terms? Anyway, I clearly qualify.
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Russell has nailed it. Any obsession that interferes with your ability to dress, act, and interact in the socially acceptable ways of your peer group makes you a geek. Actually, I think it’s not even just obsessions, but certain personality quirks that predispose you to those obsessions. It wasn’t that it was ever unclear what I needed to do to fit in (mostly, act stupider, kiss up to certain people, and wear better clothes), it was that I couldn’t seem to focus on the task with any enthusiasm. I would try to read a fashion magazine, but end up going to the library to check out books on the history of costume, because if I had to think about clothes, I needed something more substantial. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t help my popularity at all. I can tell you a lot about the history of the corset, though.
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Yes, I agree with the key component of alienation to any definition of geek identity. Ancarett and Russell have expressed it nicely.
I have also been pondering, however, the issue of appropriating geek identity. In other words, there are geeks who clearly have a hard time assimilating into non-geek social circles. Are we being unfair by saying, jokingly, “Oh, I’m a literature geek!” when our knowledge of literature, say, buys us access to certain relatively culturally elite circles?
Just pondering…
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IMHO it’s not about missing some phase of interpersonal development. Rather it’s having an interest in something that’s so strong that it overrides “cool”, i.e. detached behavior. To me, marker behaviors for geekdom include learning all available minutiae about a topic, getting way too excited about something and freaking others out with the strength of your opinion/reaction, etc. In this way the geek term has been stretched in recent years to include just about anything a person gets way way too into.
It’s interesting because we have a love/hate relationship with geekdom. In many environments you’re the top dog if you’ve mastered absolutely all the data. But outside that environment you’re a geek. The tax geek’s a bore at a dinner party but your best friend in April. And there appears to be a strong correlation between geekdom and income!!!
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“Are we being unfair by saying, jokingly, ‘Oh, I’m a literature geek!’ when our knowledge of literature, say, buys us access to certain relatively culturally elite circles?”
Interesting question, buzz. One might point to the fact that, sometime around 1985 or so, the increasing omnipresence of computer technology made being a “computer geek” quasi-fashionable; the world at large recognized that the “geeks were inheriting the earth,” or at least a significant chunk of the GDP (I think Bill Gates was on the cover of Esquire or something, under a headline much like this), and yet this didn’t lead to any change in their socially ascribed identity. So certain kinds of geeks have been penetrating (or creating their own kind of) elite circles for a while now; it’s nothing new.
Then again, there remains the fact that some minority tastes/technologies/ways of life, even if they can’t be accommodated to majority preferences (the way most kinds of musical or sport obsessions generally can), nonetheless come with a kind of cultural pedigree. So, take literature for example. Being a bookworm is school is going to mark you, no two ways about it. And yet, geeking out over Thomas Pynchon or Emily Bronte or Old English poetry nonetheless gets more respect from the world than geeking out over Star Trek novelizations. So maybe a true “geek” is a particular species of some larger genus of which we (by virtue of the fact that we’re actually blogging about this) are also a part?
I like what you say about “cool”/detatched behavior, Jen. But I think what you say fits in with my point. I think it’s the very existence of such an obsessive interest in minutiae that excludes the picking up of social cues. Everyone has interests; lots of people kind of liked Star Trek. But geeks are the ones who are interested enough in it that they missed out on the fact that they liked it so much more than everyone else.
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Being able to install Linux and choosing to run it as your daily operating system seems more than enough to qualify, because otherwise I don’t quite understand. I don’t play D&D, I haven’t seen all the Star Wars movies or any of Star Trek, I read one sci-fi book a year… but people will still assure you that I’m geeky. It’s got to be the Linux… or the professional software developer thing. My attachment to geek culture(s) is loose, but I’m still a geek.
Maybe adolescence is key here. That was when I read Asimov, Clarke and Tolkien (and the Brontes and Austen, but that’s not a popular high school thing either).
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I know what makes a geek:
Someone pointing out in response to the questions posed that it’s actually Boba Fett, not Bobo Fett.
Thank you, I’ll be merrily going on my geek way now.
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How’s this for a geek in training: my nine-year-old son just walked by and said, “I’ve decided to use this graph paper dad gave me. It’s great for designing games.”
I’m so proud. And yes, his dad and I are both geeks.
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***Any obsession that interferes with your ability to dress, act, and interact in the socially acceptable ways of your peer group makes you a geek. ***
Well, no.
I think that its more a selecting of a peer group.
You can’t say that an exhaustive knowledge of Star Trek or the ability to quote long stretches of Monty Python interferes with your ability to interact with your peer group if that is what is *required* to interact with the friends you have chosen. That chosen peer group may not be mainstream, but it is a peer group.
You could just as well argue by that definition (and you make the attempt) that a jock is a “sports geek,” whose insistence on spending so much time absorbing the minutae of football leads them to dress in funny outfits and use wierd lingo. But that’s considered “normal” and thus not geeky. Why is that?
My own geek cred? I have every Star Wars figure made up to 1985, I was Princess Leia for Halloween twice, I read Lord of the Rings before I was 10, I’ve got every Sandman from #20-something on, I first hit the WWW with Mosaic in 1995. But most folks I know today wouldn’t guess that.
My own geek self-identity is actually Stealth Geek:
http://www.swcp.com/~diamond/sg-faq.html
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a geek is anyone who knows entirely too much about anything. my husband is a super geek because he knows entirely too much about just about everything. i’m a beauty product geek and very quick on my way to becoming a crafting geek. also, the best people i know are geeks.
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I know what maketh not a geek: not having seen any of the Star Wars films. And who does that describe? Clancy Ratliff.
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Geeks are people who allow simple interest to pass by a passing whim of the mainstream. They come in all shapes and sizes wth different names: skate rats, meatheads, drama geek, computer geek, band geek,etc. Geeks are the majority of the world. Prepare to be assimilated into geekdom!
Han shot first.
-Kip
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“I had a long conversation once with a friend about what constitutes a “geek.” Our conclusion was that geeks are people who, at a point in their life when they presumably should have been interacting with the majority of their peer group and thereby learning valuable social skills, instead focused their attention on some distracting technology/body of literature/way of life/etc., and thus missed out on internalizing all sorts of social cues.”
This presupposes, of course, that they had the option of interacting with the majority of their peer group. The majority of their peer group has their own ideas about who’s worth interacting with, and some don’t qualify. It could be that some people actually learn social cues before they start school. Back in the day, it seemed to me that most people were born knowing how to interact, and a few just weren’t and had to spend long years figuring it out.
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Forgive me for not answering the questions. They have been adequately answered above.
What I found both interesting and uplifting was reading the answers to the questions.
Obviously, being “geeky” means being outside the so called “mainstream” (majority, dominant, group) and, also obviously, this can be a really painful experience, if it is a result of rejection rather than choice.
But this was not the tenor of the above responses. Quite to the contrary, virtually every respondent seemed to happily accept his/her differentness. So the subjective problem, which is always much greater than the objective
problem, largely did not appear to exist. Rather, everyone had either enthusiastically embraced, or at least happily acquiesed in, their “differentness”.
Yes, there’s more than one apple on the tree and many roads lead to Rome.
How wonderful that there are so many healthy people out there who accept themselves!
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All roads we travel are the ones we have chosen.
To be denied access to any particular group of people usually is a result in not paying sufficient attention to their social rules. If you don’t find them interesting enough to adhere to, you usually get pushed out to the fringes.
There is no crime in living on the edges because you chose not to cut your hair in a particular way, or necessarily want to laugh at the alpha male’s jokes.
When you are young you are hurt by it, and you turn to other things.
Hopefully, when you get older you realize that it was your own unconscious doing that led you to where you now are.
That is a good thing.
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