Online Sex Talk and the Social World by Chrystie Myketiak

Author:Chrystie Myketiak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030535797
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Nerds and Geeks

As much as Walford is constructed as both a heterosexual space and one where there are more men than women, it is also a geeky and nerdy space. Since the time that Walford was created in the mid-1990s, the cache of nerds has dramatically changed in contemporary culture; the chatlogs are situated within an approximate midpoint in that culture shift. There is no consensus about how to operationalise the terms geeks and nerds. They can be treated as distinct identities, such as in Coupland’s (1996) novel Microserfs, yet the terms are sometimes used interchangeably (e.g., Eglash 2002; Quail 2011). In an attempt to create a typology of nerds, Nugent (2008) claims that there are two kinds. The first type is a group of (mainly) men who resemble machines, are passionate about one or more technical activities or applications, avoid confrontation, favour logic and rationalism, use formal written language even in verbal communication, and prefer interacting with machines to people. The second type is less male-dominated than the first group and may not share any other common attributes with them other than social exclusion in secondary school. In contrast with Nugent, Turkle (2005: 196) doesn’t create subtypes but argues that nerds are present and future computer scientists, engineers, and hackers who celebrate their nerdiness, especially in their collegiate environment. The link between technology and nerds is echoed in other researchers’ definitions (e.g., Eglash 2002; Kendall 1999, 2002; Nugent 2008; Wajcman 1991).

Eckert’s (1989) classic study investigating language use in American high schools argues that there are two main categories of students: burnouts or underachieving students who are unlikely to attend university and jocks, overachieving, popular, university-bound students who are involved in sanctioned school extra-curricular activities such as sports and student council. However, she also notes that in addition to these main groups, there is a small but distinctive third group of nerds that does not overlap with either of the former groups. She argues that while the burnouts and jocks can be understood as each other’s opposites, nerds are the opposites of both groups. While nerds are academic overachievers, they are also unlikely to be involved in sanctioned school activities. Nerds can then be seen as existing outside the bounds of conventional dialectics. While there have been increased efforts to expand schools’ repertoires of extra-curricular activities so that programming, gaming, and hacking clubs coexist alongside the more traditional activities that Eckert describes, the cultural values that are inscribed on these clubs continue to vary. Woo (2015: 2–3) argues that the space that geeks occupy can be ‘uncomfortable’ because it is at once within the mainstream, through conforming to adult expectations, but also outside of it, because of how geeks differ from their peers in their media tastes and interests. This ‘uncomfortable’ space is perhaps most pronounced when those outside the group direct the label towards others as an insult or pejorative. In their research, Bishop et al. (2004) explain that for teenagers, “being a nerd is like having a communicable disease” (Bishop et al.

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