Wil Wheaton (http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup) has some interesting things to say about the recent Geek Advancement rants hitting the blogosphere and his feelings about being used in the video.
A bunch of geek-celebrities appear in the video for the Society for Geek Advancement (http://geekadvancement.com), a charity PR thing. What they didn't know was that they would be appearing in the video as geeks with other celebrity geeks who aren't really all that well known for their geekiness:
Ashton Kutcher, Shaq, MC Hammer? Evidently the project's definition of geek has expanded well beyond the original parameters.
Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, Woz . . . no brainers . . . geeks through to the core.
Wheaton feels like he wasn't lied to about the what the project meant (it is a charity program of sorts) but that the definitions got changed and suddenly it was like geeks trying to convince the cool kids that we're cool and not nerds. See his reaction to the reactions on his blog at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/05/regarding-the-difference-between-embracing-and-exploiting-geek-culture.html#comment-6a00d8341c59aa53ef01156f8d945a970c. The inclusion of self-promoting marketers and celebrities who defintely not members of geek culture but whose PR folks seem to want them to sell that culture feels like a bit of a sellout.
Wheaton notes that he felt the bit of having people protest that they "don't play Dungeons and Dragons" to somehow prove that they are not uncool was a bit much as it implies there's something wrong about playing D&D. Yes, breaking stereotypes is neat but there are certain things in geek culture that are stereotypes because they are wide spread so to specifically single that part of the stereotype out as something one doesn't do implies that there's something wrong with doing it.
Come to
think of it, wouldn't it be neat to see a video of a bunch of
celebrities admitting that they DO do all those geekie things . . . I
mean folks who really do those things. Instead of a video that tries to
say "we don't do those WEIRD things and we're geeks but really normal
just like you" have 'em saying the geekish things they do say and we're
geeks and we're really normal just like you.
All the best,
Brian
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Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH [brian@briandavidphillips.com]
Hypnotist, Hypnotherapist, Intuitionist, Trance Wizard
President, Society of Experiential Trance
Associate Professor, NCCU, Taipei, Taiwan
While
I agree strongly with Wheaton that the whole "I don't play D&D" bit
was offensive in that it seemed to imply that there was something wrong
with playing D&D (I am assuming REAL D&D at a table and not
just the computer games which don't count quite so far in terms of
geekiness), but I felt the same sort of twinge when Wheaton's bit came up
and he said "I don't speak Klingon" as if there were likewise something
seriously wrong with the folks who do that (I don't, although I do have
the edition of Hamlet in the original Klingon but I respect the folks
who do learn it for whatever purpose as well as the ones who learn the
various elvish tongues from the Rings) as there was a slight
implication that such language experiments or even things Trek aren't
so much geekie but goofy (same with the D&D backhand). The video
spent a lot of time defining Geek as things "we don't do" rather than
embracing what we do do and how that's kind of pretty damned nifty.