The Essential Elements of Geek Culture (March, 2008)
I was talking to my web programming seminar about regular expressions and made an allusion to the xkcd comic on that topic. Unfortunately, none of them had seen it, probably because none of them were familiar with xkcd.
Students should become familiar with the concepts and practice of the discipline, but also with the culture and in-jokes that will help them fit in when they get into industry or graduate school. I also like to get people to laugh in ways that are relevant to the subject material (yes, I use a lot of cheesy geek jokes — ask me to tell you my LISP joke sometime).
I asked the Twitter community what other geek cultural elements I should introduce the students to, and here are the answers:
- The comics: xkcd, Penny Arcade
- The cute things: Kitty Hell, Pink Tentacle, Cute Overload, icanhazcheezburger (which is also, apparently, a business)
- Current events: Fake Steve, The Onion, Fark
- The blogs: Boing Boing
- The IRC: bash.org
- The shopping: Think Geek, Jinx
- The field trip: ROFLcon (Who wants to go?)
This list is thanks to (in order of appearance) @mediacrisis, @rubaiyat, @techpickles, @mattgillooly, @hempstyle, and @inkedmn.
7 comments
In the non-online category, there are several classic geek movies that must be watched in order to understand portions of geek culture, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Princess Bride, Real Genius, Ghostbusters, etc. Second-tier selections would include movies like Sneakers, Hackers (for the cheese), and a movie for which I can’t defend my eccentric preference, The Core.
Music: They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulton
Books: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Gödel Escher Bach
Take them to the beginning- Revenge of the Nerds
Movies: Buckeroo Banzai, Office Space is a little more mainstream but it nails office culture (especially in IT)
TV: Buffy
Books: Hackers and Painters, Software Craftsmanship, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (delves into social isolation in different facets)
Music: Smiths, Modern English, Bob Mould (okay, maybe only for > 30-something Geeks)
Back to online, how about web animations?
Strong Bad! (and crew)
Perhaps not quite as geeky, but still a classic.
Another category of its own would be games.
- Anything roleplaying
- anything “tower defense”
- multiplayer First-person shooters
A geek must be somewhat familiar with the concepts in a number of types of games, partly because of the jargon that flows back from gaming.
I’d add Engadget and SlashDot to the “blogs” section… and for infantile stuff not found on Fark, throw in ILoveBacon.com
hmmm that seems like a mighty slim list! Where is Star trek?
As Richard referenced in the revenge of the Nerds comment above, and I’ll interpolate from, there is a geek inside all of us.
I suggest that when culture is discussed that it is followed by a time stamp, such as ‘geek culture as of march 2008′ because it is not geek culture circa 1988.
look at the comments, we all have our thoughts on geek culture and the concept of ‘geek shopping’ outside of a bookstore, computer or comic shop seems strange to me!
personal geek pinnacle
~*IVCHS computer club 1984*~
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