As I’ve been writing up the methodology section for my dissertation proposal, I realize that the degree to which rather successfully I rely on happenstance probably seems unbelievable. Ethnographers are supposed to go out into the world to immerse themselves in the culture of interest, and so I spend thousands of dollars (largely out of my own pocket) to visit fan and tech conventions. The thing is, though, that ethnographers are really easy to switch into “researcher mode”—so every time I bump into something that seems even remotely relevant to my dissertation, I take a closer look. Nowadays, as it turns out, you can’t take two steps in any direction without stumbling over something geeky.

Continue reading “Dumb Luck as an Ethnographic Method” →

I just spent the weekend at a conference hosted by MIT, Media in Transition 5. I presented my paper “The Well Dressed Geek: Media Appropriation and Subcultural Style” on Sunday. I just want to make a couple quick revisions before I send along the paper to upload, but you can see the abstract on MiT5’s site; here are my slides and presentation notes, if you’re interested. (Update: the full paper is now available online. I’ll be revising it for publication shortly, so please feel free to email with any comments.)

Continue reading “Media in Transition 5” →

While googling around for stuff to add to my lit review, I came upon an interesting geek culture bibliography by William L. Svitavsky in Reconstruction. Svitavsky hits on some of the points I’ve wanted to consider further in my own work, and pretty concisely sums up why I have been hoping to help bridge the gap between popular knowledge and academic consideration of media cultures:

When a study profiles a group engaged in one of these activities, it is not unusual for the group’s participation in the other activities to be mentioned as well. In popular culture (as opposed to studies of popular culture), this overlap has been recognized all along. Each of these groups has been ridiculed as “geeks” or “nerds”, and each has subverted those terms into proud self-identification. In his work on media fandom, Henry Jenkins observes that active audiences are “textual poachers” who move from one text to another, and cannot be accurately defined by their relationship with a single text; it may be useful, then, to study geek culture as a whole rather than to focus exclusively on its component areas of interest. This bibliography is an effort to support such a study of the interrelated “geek” subcultures.

Most studies of fandom, in other words, focus on a particular fan group or attempt to give a broad picture of “fandom” as a concept. But how do we account for overlapping subgroups of fans?

I wish I had the time right now to propose some amendments to Svitavsky’s list, such as the inclusion of Hills’s Fan Cultures and an entire category for video games, but I’ll have to cut the blogging short today. Maybe this is something worth returning to for a future project, though. The plan for this article (noted in the journal’s table of contents for that issue) was to make this a “living bibliography” that the author could update over time. This was back in 2001, and the last update was 2002, so perhaps a geek culture wiki would make more sense. Arguably, Wikipedia is already a geek culture wiki, seeing as how the entries for things like Star Wars are more extensive than entries for things like some state legislatures or the entire Pacific Ocean. A specifically academic bibliography wiki, however, formatted somewhat like Svitavsky’s article, would fill a niche that may not be filled elsewhere, and would certainly be less cluttered.