Cleaning out my mailbox, I came across a New York Times article forwarded to my from Lee S. several weeks ago about how librarians are hip now.
How did such a nerdy profession become cool — aside from the fact that a certain amount of nerdiness is now cool? Many young librarians and library professors said that the work is no longer just about books but also about organizing and connecting people with information, including music and movies.
Here are some relevant links people sent me during my travels, plus a couple I just stumbled upon today. I haven’t had a chance to read them myself yet.
I hear people talking about user-generated content as if it just happens—thousands or millions of people just independently assemble to create this great big system, and there you go. This is a little easier to swallow for things like YouTube and Flickr, where the interface is simple enough and the input is individualized enough that you can kind of see how some sort of system might emerge from a chaotic flow of materials. It doesn’t really make as much sense when you think about open source software, though, which one would imagine must be much more coordinated. I’ve often wondered how on earth that stuff happens.
Thank goodness someone had the good sense to ask Slashdot how to join an open source project. The answers range from the technical (which projects are easier to work on, which parts are easiest to contribute to) to the cultural (which help will be most welcome, how to avoid nerds with big egos).
The question posed in this post’s title has been at the center of a debate I’ve been having lately. This person, whose opinion I generally value greatly, suggests that “geek culture” as a concept didn’t exist prior to the 1980s; it was born, he suggests, out of the credibility accorded to geeks through their mastery of digital media. Therefore, digital media should be considered at the heart of geek culture as a whole. From my perspective, I do think that digital media have been key in transforming what we know as geek culture, but I have some reservations about the line of reasoning that places such media as the initiator of this culture in the first place.
Continue reading “What Sparked the Birth of Geek Culture?” →
Yesterday, I wrote a post about Gizmodo readers commenting on Transformers costumes. I linked to Joachim Bengtsson, who commented to ask why people feel the need to qualify their praise of the elaborate costumes by declaring that the costume designers were really nerdy (not to mention that the video had been posted in Gizmodo’s “Too Much Free Time” category). And I wondered aloud: If there are tens of millions of self-identified geeks in the US alone, and if (it seems pretty safe to assume that) most of them aren’t doing cosplay, fan fiction, machinima, or the other super-involved activities that receive a disproportionate amount of attention among fan scholars but get derided as “too nerdy” by so many fans, then what are these geeks doing that’s so geeky? Well, I think I stumbled upon one way to find out.
Continue reading “A Purposive Sampling Method for Internet-based Research” →
I’m doing some (late) spring cleaning today, and I’ve decided this might as well also extend to my WordPress drafts. Here are a couple links I meant to expound upon, but instead I’ll just present them straight before they gather any more dust.
A friend and fellow Ph.D. student just referred me to “‘legitimized’ plagiarism on Facebook,” an application called Facebook Docs. From the Facebook page:
Make next year easier… upload last year’s homework to Facebook Docs! […]
It may be summer, but before you delete all of your homework, you should upload it to FACEBOOK DOCS!
FACEBOOK DOCS is an application made by a company called SCRIBD.
SCRIBD : TEXT :: YOUTUBE : VIDEOSWouldn’t it be nice if next time you got stuck on a problem, you could just open up Facebook Docs and find the paper of a student from last year… not to cheat, but just to compare…
Everything you write is /your/ property. Thus, there’s no reason to not share off your mad writing skills and maybe help some poor soul down the road…
Its like getting a book with comments already in the margin!
PS… Cheating is wrong. but helping others is Christian.
Now, a few things.
Continue reading “Plagiarist Paradise, or Homework as Communication Medium?” →
Here’s a (probably pretty spot-on) piece on why the average computer user has no interest in Linux (assuming the average computer user even knows what Linux is). In summary:
I think that last item pretty much sums up the previous four, though. Some die-hard Linux users seem totally baffled that the average computer user would choose the OS equivalent of a clunky station wagon over a free, rocket-powered tank (to borrow Neal Stephenson’s metaphor). The truth is, though, that you need to be interested enough in computers—no, not just interested, but dedicated to a certain kind of computing experience—to choose Linux over one of the “default” alternatives. Most people don’t want to know how their computers work—they just want them to work. Most people don’t want to take the time to learn and customize.
Once you get used to a new OS, using it doesn’t really have to be a hobby. Learning to use a new thing that doesn’t hide the complicated parts so much, without phone tech support, would essentially require taking on a new hobby for the average computer user.
I will say this, though: when the Open Source community starts attracting (and deferring to) talented designers in matters of user interface, I may be willing to take all that back.
Clive Thompson writes a longish article for the New York Times Magazine about artists connecting with fans through the internet. He devotes a lot of space to describing Jonathan Coulton, a “geek troubador” (in the words of the Boing Boing link that alerted me to this).
Having been to his web site (via a link from Penny Arcade, downloaded some songs, and seen him live with John Hodgman, I knew Jonathan Coulton was all about the geeky music: not only does he give away dozens of songs for free on his blog, a good number of them are about things like shy programmers and zombies. The above-linked article really drives home just how linked in he is to fan cultures, though:
His fans need him; he needs them. Which is why, every day, Coulton wakes up, gets coffee, cracks open his PowerBook and hunkers down for up to six hours of nonstop and frequently exhausting communion with his virtual crowd. The day I met him, he was examining a music video that a woman who identified herself as a “blithering fan†had made for his song “Someone Is Crazy.†It was a collection of scenes from anime cartoons, expertly spliced together and offered on YouTube.
“She spent hours working on this,†Coulton marveled. “And now her friends are watching that video, and fans of that anime cartoon are watching this video. And that’s how people are finding me. It’s a crucial part of the picture. And so I have to watch this video; I have to respond to her.†He bashed out a hasty thank-you note and then forwarded the link to another supporter — this one in Britain — who runs “The Jonathan Coulton Project,†a Web site that exists specifically to archive his fan-made music videos.
Clive Thompson casts this as the changing face of music and film, but I wonder how much the geek image has to do with this. Sure, the Hold Steady has an “appointed geek” to handle fan relations online, but does he spend as much time on that as the fellow who’s writing songs about the Mandlebrot Set?
One of my interviewees recently directed me to an academic paper about programming skills as a function of thinking styles. (Here’s a summary and discussion.) In short, it claims to have found a superbly accurate test to determine whether someone would succeed or fail in computer science classes based on whether that person thinks in terms of abstract rule sets.
It’s an interesting idea, but I’d have to take a closer look at the paper to comment on its methodology, and I’m a little wary of the authors’ implication that this test should be applied as a weed-out mechanism. Introductory computer science classes are already conceived of as weed-out classes at many schools, which leads me to wonder if the high failure rates among CS students and people who took this pre-test say more about people’s response to different teaching styles than about their inherent abilities, let alone their capacity to learn new things.
My line of thinking on this right now, at least, is more in line with the people behind Scratch at the MIT Media Lab. The Boston Globe has an article online about Scratch, MIT’s free programming language developed for educational purposes (link via Slashdot):
The goal: turn a daunting subject usually taught in college and considered the domain of geeks into an integral part of education for the grade-school set. MIT researchers hope the program will promote a broader cultural shift, giving a generation already comfortable using computers to consume content online a set of new, easy-to-use tools to change the online landscape itself. […]
“With Scratch, we get rid of a lot of the overhead and let students sink their teeth into the concepts — literally after a day of programming in Scratch they have their own games and own artwork,” [David Malan] said.
This is a clever idea. I remember working with Logo back in elementary school, but I had no idea what the purpose of those exercises was at the time. Making project goals apparent and letting students see the fruits of their labor early will likely make the experience more rewarding and perhaps compel some to learn more powerful languages.
I’m not entirely dismissing the possibility that there may be some observable psychological habits peculiar to “geeky thinking,” and perhaps I should be exploring such claims further. Another interviewee just suggested to me today that the highest concentrations of people with autism are in Boston, Austin, and the Bay Area, which is reminiscent of things I’ve read before about the prevalence of Asperger Syndrome in Silicon Valley. Even so, I think it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that people shouldn’t bother pursuing things that don’t come naturally.
Geek Studies