Quick Shot II Turbo
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: ---
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 Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 1:43 pm |
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This is a (almost) completely unrelated political rant, but:
| article wrote: |
| Did we lose a war with Nerdistan? |
In 2005, from what I could tell, Afghanistan was still a fairly hot topic in the American media and a joke like this could be forgiven as something that just fit the mood of the moment (i.e. Nerdistan as a wordplay on Afghanistan). But reading it now... it really does feel as if this a pun based on the negative generalization that countries ending with -stan are all bad, terrorist-harboring, poverty-ridden dumps somewhere in Asia / below Russia that "need to be dealt with by all means necessary." A simple joke like this keeps these negative prejudices towards obscure countries alive in the public mind, which in turn leads to bigger problems such as racism.
I could see someone like Jon Stewart making a more high-browish joke with this, directly referring to the generalization, but as the article in question is about lifestyle, I'd doubt that it's aims were set anywhere near that.
Obviously I'm being a little touchy on this matter. It's just that recent developments (and their aftermath on the great wide internets) have shown that there's a fair amount of idiotic "international observers" among the common folk that subscribe to ideas which, for example, pigeonhole former Soviet Union satellite countries such as my own as propagators of (neo)nazism, facism, or both. Idiots have always existed, especially on the Internet, but I do think it should be the duty of the mass media to curb such behaviour in lieu of dumb puns.
On-topic: I remember discussing this subject with my flatmate and we agreed on a similar classification as psiga, in that geeks are cool and the word has mostly positive connotations these days, but the words "nerd" and "dork" in particular still carry negative connotations -- based on what we have seen from the English-speaking media.
And besides, I'm not even sure if the hardcore nerds that we seen in strange movies from the 80s really exist anymore. All the people that I know who are hardcore into something or other, be it D&D or games, are all normal people to the outside world, exhibiting little to no signs of social awkwardness. And the few socially awkward people that I know are just socially awkward, exhibiting little to no affinity to anything in particular. There correlation between these two is slowly becoming a myth.
Furthermore, the Internet (and Web 2.0 in particular) has more and more closed the gap between people who obsess about objects (geeks/nerds/dorks) vs. people who obsess about relationships and social status ("normal" people), because all of the most popular services and applications serve both of these, examples being WoW (being obsessed with fantasy vs. being obsessed with your status in a guild); MySpace (being obsessed with bands and pornstars vs. being obsessed with, well, other people in any and every way), etc. All these people are coming together and are nurturing needs they've either ignored or been denied of in the past and as such they become "geeks" to a certain clique and people of high social status to another group of people.
All this doesn't mean that the terms nerd, dork and geek will fade away, as hardcore otakus with a sizeable manga collection, cosplay suits and several 1/6 scale Mikuru PVC's will still remain the fringe types that can be referred to with these words. But, unlike the stereotypes of the past, these people might and eventually will appear to us much more normal than before, because this massive exposure of information has made "us" and "them" more close to eachother and thus helped us form healthier social relationships, and so forth. This is particularly true with the massive success of things like "Densha Otoko," which, if Nakagawa Shoko is to be believed, made otakus more popular, but also made them throw away the word otaku in favour of wotaku, so as to signify this new type of otaku, who is as much, if not more, "normal" and good than a "regular" person.
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