Geek Studies is the academic blog for Jason Tocci, an assistant professor of communication at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA. My research focuses on digital media and visual culture, with particular attention to electronic games and visual design. In addition to Geek Studies, I am also a contributing writer to Shouting Loudly, a media policy and criticism blog maintained by my colleagues from the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn, Bill Herman and Lokman Tsui.

Geek Studies was originally founded to present observations and commentary about traditionally/stereotypically geeky media and culture, with periodic updates on the progress of my dissertation project, Geek Cultures: Media and Identity in the Digital Age. Several of my interviewees expressed interest in being kept up to date on my project, and a couple specifically suggested setting up a web site so that people could follow along and offer feedback. Thanks to such feedback, I found that “ethnographic blogging” has useful implications for multi-site, multi-method ethnography all its own, and so Geek Studies helped provide a more integrated view of geek cultures. Now that the dissertation is complete, I continue to blog here about my research interests—not necessarily about geeks, but, given my proclivities, probably including some pretty nerdy stuff all the same.

As for the blog’s title, most of my interviewees preferred to call themselves “geeks” over “nerds” or “dorks,” so I went with “Geek Studies.” The same words mean different things for different people, however, so this could have just as easily been called “Nerd Studies” or any of a number of other things. The tone here will be respectful to anyone regardless of labels, self-declared or otherwise. All visitors are invited to comment under whatever names they choose, and email addresses are not required to comment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some common questions I tend to get when I talk about the research I’ve done on geeks, with links to posts that address them.

Q: What’s the difference between a geek and a nerd?
A: Depends entirely on whom you ask. Some definitions simply reflect the common nerdy predilection for categorization and analysis, while others are more obviously an attempt to claim positive stereotypes while distancing oneself from negative stereotypes (and from other geeks/nerds by association). See my post collecting various definitions of “Geeks vs. Nerds” and Z.’s post on Hipster, Please! on “The Nerd vs. Geek Debate (and Why We Don’t Need to Have It).” I also have an entire category of posts on this blog titled “Defining Geekdom,” further exploring how geeks and nerds discuss what makes one a “real” geek. I use these terms interchangeably as a way of recognizing that they have no fixed meaning, but tend to be used similarly. (Also, it gets boring using the same word over and over again when writing a dissertation for a few hundred pages.)

Q: Isn’t ‘geek’ an insult?
A: For many, ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ start out as insults, in childhood, but come to be reclaimed as a badge of pride in adolescence or early adulthood. For many, the sense of feeling (or even having felt) marginalized can be a formative experience in understanding oneself as a geek. See, for instance, my post on defining what is “Authentically Geeky.”

Q: Are there female geeks? Black geeks?
A: Absolutely. Race and gender are powerful and prevalent dimensions of identity, and commonly interact with and butt up against other dimensions of identity. Geek identity, however, grows out from other cultural experiences and values as well, illustrating some commonalities beyond race and gender. Websites like the Black Nerds Network and the Geek Feminism Wiki offer examples of how some groups assert the existence of geeks beyond the stereotypical white, male image, though my research at sites in the “real world” also brought me into contact with a broader range of nerds than one might expect.

Contact & Credits

This blog runs on WordPress and is built on a heavily modified version of Azeem Azeez’s White as Milk theme.

Hosting through Dreamhost, graciously provided by Kai.

Many (perhaps even most) of the links on this blog come from a few particularly industrious friends and informants. Special thanks to ChurchHatesTucker, Matt S. at free-geek, and Z. at Hipster, Please!

If you have any questions or suggestions that you’d rather send directly than post to comments, feel free to email me at jason@geekstudies.org.