Game Harlot

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

“mainstream social acceptance,” indeed

So, geek is officially cool now, as evidenced by this video from the “Society for Geek Advancement” entitled simply “I am a Geek”:

But, lest we forget, we must all be socially approved geeks.  We will all use Twitter (soo subversive and counter-culture) and talk about it a lot, since that will make us edgy and tech savvy.  We will wear stylish glasses in an ironic fashion, and also ironically appreciate the nostalgic humor personified by the appearance of MC Hammer (an obvious pillar of geek culture) in this video.  Also, we shall throw around a few words about coding in order to really up our cred and make us seem cool and mysterious with our “new language,” but we swear never to do anything as lame as actually play D&D, because that would be… geeky.

Uh huh.

While this… project… thing seems to be benefiting a charity, it comes across as a trying-too-hard social media commercial.  (They use the term “social capital” in their About section, for fuck’s sake.) Even Wil Wheaton came out and said he regretted doing it!

“I was under the impression that this video would feature actual geeks who are important to our culture, like Woz, Felicia Day, Leo Laporte, and Jonathan Coulton. Instead, I saw a lot of entrepreneurs who have good marketing instincts, joined by a bunch of celebrities who are attempting to co-opt our culture because it’s what their publicity team is telling them to do.

When you’re speaking to people who read TMZ and People magazine, getting contributions from MC Hammer, Ashton Kutcher and Shaq is a logical choice. But when you’re speaking to geeks, it’s insulting to us to pretend that they are part of and speak for our culture. Those people are not geeks; they’re celebrities who happen to use Twitter.”

He also comes out in huge nerdy support of D&D, which is utterly charming; the whole post is basically an excellently written “this was not what I signed up for” damage control piece.

I really have no problem with social media, nor the people who can do amazing things with it to their advantage.  But let’s call it what it is and leave the pretending to the LARPers.