What's In A Name? (How We Define Ourselves)

 

Why am I using Emma Stone gifs to kick off this post, you might be asking yourselves?

Not only am I a big fan of her work, but like a lot of actresses and actors, she has many faces she can put on for the world. And one of them appears to contain adorable glasses that popped up when I Googled 'geek gifs' :)

And that got me thinking more about geek culture, and how a lot of people who have this interests that aren't shared by the majority of people might at times feel ashamed of their likes and interests and at times may even try to hide those things about themselves.

And when you look at the other end of the spectrum, you've got people who are more than welcome to flaunt their interests with the world, even if, and sometimes because, it sets them apart from everybody else.

I'd like to think I'm closer to the 'If You Got It, Flaunt It!' end of the spectrum, but I'm certainly not perfect. Still, Simon Pegg seems to agree with me!:

Simon Pegg is the best - those are words of wisdom to live by right there!

Anyway, both this typical situation that people who self-identify as geeks and a forum post from my professor got me to thinking about self-identification in the geek world, and how everybody is such an individual even when some of us share the same interests.

Let me say this loud and clear:

There Is No 1 Single Definition Of A 'Geek'

There are so many types out there, it's pretty crazy!

Plus there is almost a sense of being able to evaluate just how much of a geek a person can be. But don't get me wrong, geek-dom is not some sort of exclusive club you can only belong to if you own so many anime figurines or have gotten so many XBOX achievements. If anything it's the exact opposite; we're a friendly, inclusive bunch.

So anyway, my professor asked me on our school forums if blogs were the preferred communication medium for geeks, and after I explained to him that we're pretty much everywhere and there's no one communication medium that will contain us all, he wrote back with:

- well I guess eventually you will need to poll your readers to see how many self-identify as geeks......it would be an interesting sociological experiment

From there, I really got to thinking about the potential readership of what I'll be writing here.

As I explained in my first post, I'm going to be trying my absolute hardest to write posts that vary greatly from one another so that I can expand the number of viewers I'll get by hitting on a bunch of different interests.

However, I never really considered the fact that people that might not consider themselves geeks might be among my readers as well.

Ergo, I thought I would do a little write-up here and talk about how we might define ourselves, full-blown geeks or otherwise, and in what ways we might even categorize ourselves among the many sub-topics of geek-dom.

To tell you guys about the sub-topics themselves, I thought I might share with you a book I recently picked up that labels these 'types' of geeks in existence.