(Mind wandering in the cause of distraction.)
For some reason, I am a person who completely missed on what is commonly thought of as “geek culture.” In my life, I’ve seen maybe three episodes of MST3K. I saw a good few episodes of Star Trek – both original and Next Generation – but never really got into them aside from the Borg cliffhanger in 1990, which in my mind was still a better Trek movie than any of the Next Generation-featuring ones. While I was drawn into Doctor Who in my youth, it’s sort of gone by the boards lately. I was into comics for exactly four years between 1983 and 1987, and into tabletop RPGs maybe 1982 to 1987 tops. I was a Star Wars obsessive, obviously, but that just made me a kid in the 70s. I never got much further into the Expanded Universe than the original Thrawn trilogy (and missed very little, by all accounts; the other EU books I did read were pretty much crap). I’ve still never seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a single episode of Red Dwarf or Babylon 5, or any of seasons 1 or 4 of Blackadder. I’ve read one Discworld book and don’t remember that much of it and my sci-fi literary canon basically begins with Connie Willis and ends with William Gibson.
I didn’t have a computer at home until I went off to grad school, aside from the times over Christmas break when my dad would bring one home to noodle around on (never to any great effect). I never did online gaming other than at work, in the days of Quake and Unreal and original-flavor Call of Duty. I bought a PlayStation 2 mostly as a DVD player and owned exactly two games for it (NCAA Basketball ’04 and Arena Football, neither of which I played more than twice). My first BBS membership was in 1994. And while I was on Slashdot in the late 90s, I’ve never had an account on Digg or Reddit or anything similar. I don’t even follow Wil Wheaton or Felicia Day on Twitter.
In short, while I did hit some of the most obvious markers and am broadly conversant in the lingua franca, I never really bought into capital-letter Geek Culture. It’s possible that there just wasn’t that much of it accessible in exurban Alabama in the 1980s, or that the pre-Internet world made it a lot harder to find and connect with things. Or maybe it’s just the same pop-culture blind spot that I still have to this day (a short list of current hings I’ve never seen an episode of: Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, House of Cards, Veep, The Walking Dead, Justified). But a healthy grounding in geek culture was something that was necessary if you were going to fit into the people at my undergrad that didn’t fit in, so…well…there you go.
It’s a tough one. On the one hand you want to reject that there’s any qualitative difference between, say, Tolkien obsessives and Auburn fanatics. But on the other hand, you don’t want to reject caring about everything and anything. But on the third hand…I suppose on the third hand, I’ve rejected a subculture that I was entirely fit for, except inasmuch as it hits the mainstream of American life and not always then. (I mean, I own almost every Marvel Cinematic Universe film, but I’ve still never seen the 2008 Incredible Hulk.)
Then again, it’s not like I was in the mainstream of popular culture…ever. I’ve never seen an episode of Three’s Company or Miami Vice, of Mad Men or The Big Bang Theory (to go opposite ends). Never saw Dallas or Dynasty. Never watched past the first 20 minutes of Lost (starting on an airplane might have been a mistake). Never seen a single minute of a single Shonda Rimes show. These days, my television viewing consists of Silicon Valley, Agents of SHIELD, Tiny House Hunters, House Hunters International, maybe Graham Norton and/or Top Gear, and an occasional smattering of rugby, Premier League soccer or the Oakland A’s. Plus reruns of California’s Gold, of course. And that’s about it. No interest in professional sports on TV otherwise, and precious little college sports aside from bowl season or March Madness. And since you can’t really participate in American sports culture if you’re punched out of the NFL…
I was listening to a podcast about expat life for Americans abroad, and apart from the fact that every single one complains about the dearth of decent Mexican food in France or New Zealand or Germany, one comment stuck out, when someone said that as an expat, she felt kind of lost – not a part of America anymore, and somehow different when back here, but not really a part of her now-home country either. And that struck home with me, largely because it fits so well. I still don’t feel wholly Californian (though I am determined to make the effort more than ever these past six months) but wouldn’t feel right returning to the DMV or Nashville. I definitely didn’t fit in whilst in undergrad but didn’t fit in with the subcultural alternative either. Somehow, I have managed to make myself fit nowhere exactly, which isn’t always a bad outcome. But it dovetails neatly with the “broad but not deep” which has characterized so much of my life…of which, blah blah blah.