When I tell people that I’m doing a dissertation on geek cultures, I think the question I get asked more than any other is: What’s the difference between a geek and a nerd? I’m never really sure if people actually want the full answer to this, but the short answer is that different people mean different things; most folks I’ve talked to either use them synonymously or think of one term as similar to but slightly more denigrating than the other (with ‘geek’ coming out on somewhat more often). Here’s a short collection of links directly addressing the distinctions people make between these terms, which I may update later rather than starting over again as a new post. Update: I’ve also started throwing in relevant examples explaining the difference between positive and negative uses of these terms.

1. Jon Katz at Wired gets people riled up by suggesting that geeks are cool now, not nerds. I can’t find the original article that started the debate, but here are two articles written in response.
2. Wikihow on how to tell the difference.
3. OkCupid’s Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test.
4. A conference paper (PDF) by Lars Konzack examining distinctions made by people on Wikipedia.
5. The editors of She’s Such a Geek! note that contributors objected to the book being titled “Female Nerds,” believing ‘geek’ to have more positive connotations.
6. In Embracing Insanity: Open Source Software Development, Russell Pavlicek devotes a whole chapter to discussing why you need to understand “geek culture” if you want to do business with open source developers. In a footnote, he explains that it’s important not to confuse geeks with nerds, as ‘nerd’ is still considered negative.
7. An editorial comment in the Wired letters page reassures offended readers that ‘geek’ can have positive uses:
   

   Hang on a sec, wrote one reader, why do Wired editors “go out of their way to insult the technically savvy by calling them geeks.” That’s missing the point — where you hear an insult, we hear a term of endearment. A geek isn’t just someone who can articulately defend her opinion of who the best Babylon 5 commander was. (Sheridan.) It’s any dogged explorer or crazed inventor, anyone who fixates on a project and won’t let go, anyone who builds his own damn rocket! It’s a label to be proud of, in any star system.

   This comment clearly assigns positive meaning to scientific/technical pursuits and negative meaning to fannish pursuits, but by answering its own exemplar question, it humbly admits the author’s acceptance of membership in the negatively geeky group.

8. In reply to a post titled “Have Geeks Gone Mainstream?”, Slashdot readers weigh in on whether it’s cool to be a geek, or whether it’s just cool to cop a geeky style. The original person who poses the question ties it in to computer science enrollment, but others bring in other geek interests, suggesting that even the readers of a site for “News for Nerds” don’t quite agree on what these terms mean.
9. From geekculture.com forums: “Whats the difference between dork nerd and geek?” [sic]. The first answer sums up all the specific distinctions that follow: “everybody has a slightly different definition for each and most of the time, the definitions overlap enough to make it impossible to specify definitive differences between them.”
10. From Slate: What’s the difference between a nerd and a nebbish? Suggests that nerds are targets of envy because they’re now respectable, whereas the nebbish is just a loveably pathetic loser with no particular connotations of media skill (but with a much clearer connotation of religious/ethnic/cultural membership).
11. From Rocky Mountain News: According to this humorous piece (drawing, perhaps, on the wisdom of the author’s children), geeks are knowledgeable of technology, nerds are mostly just klutzy, and dorks remain undefined, but probably something worse than nerds.
12. From Baylor University’s Lariat Online: This writer, a professional writing major, sugegsts that nerds are tech-job-oriented, whereas geeks are “not so productive” and have “eclectic interests—including elaborate, self-designed costuming and foam faux-weapons.” He goes on to suggest “five levels of geekdom,” describing himself as “moderate.”

We are talking about the internet here, of course, so there’s a lot more where that came from (and, unsurprisingly, this comes up pretty frequently in my own interviews). I just figured I’d share some examples here to to help me keep track, and so I’d have a page to point back to next time someone asks.

Over at Gizmodo, reader Joachim Bengtsson pretty aptly sums up the comments thread following a video of people in homemade Transformers costumes (posted in the “Too Much Free Time” category):

It amazes me that nerds seem to be so ashamed of being nerds and of other nerds. Whenever we see anything wicked which happens to also be very nerdy, we always have to say, “What a nerd! But cool!”. I wonder what’s up with that.

Anyways. Very very cool.

Good to see I’m not the only one wondering about that kind of thing.

This kind of connects with something I’ve been thinking about lately: in 2005, the SciFi Geekforce Report (commissioned by the SciFi channel) suggested that 6.9 million people in the UK self-identified as geeks. (One of many summaries of the report can be found here.) That’s just over 10% of the UK’s current population, at least according to the first hit on Google for “UK Population.” If it’s roughly the same proportion in the US, we’re talking another 30 million geeks on this side of the pond alone.

Why is this related? Well, I feel like even if you add up everyone doing cosplay (like the Transformers people above), or machinima, or fan fiction, or any of the other things that fan studies scholars tend to celebrate in fan culture, you’re still not going to be anywhere close to the combined 37 million self-identified geeks in the US and UK. Consider, too, that only the most vocal minority of Gizmodo’s millions of readers actually bothers to leave a comment, and none of the comments left so far say anything to the effect of, “Good job! I like making costumes like this too.”

For me, this raises a question: if as many of tens of millions of people aren’t doing these things, what is it that they are doing that’s so “geeky”? (My tentative answer: they’re checking out links of “geekier” people on blogs and reassuring themselves that they’re geeky enough to be in awe, but not so geeky that they’d do this stuff themselves.

I tend to think of skateboarders and starving artists as already pretty well established in terms of subcultural/countercultural cachet. Apparently, using terms like “nerd” and “dork” can signal them as even more eager to be known as outsiders. At the Art Dorks website, Chris Mostyn explains this artist collective’s name and approach (link via Boing Boing):

Dorks. Isn’t that derogatory? Not from where I’m standing. A dork, nerd, geek, weirdo, whatever, is someone who doesn’t fit into a cleanly defined mold of what a person should be in our culture. It is someone that is usually looked down on for not living up to a standard of normalcy. [...] We all share a love of drawing and whether we make monsters or meat, robots or rabbits, it is work that revels in and celebrates growing up in a pop-culture, sci-fi, kung-fu cornucopia of a culture. We make what we know, and what we know is that life is not always normal. It doesn’t always wear name brand clothes, drink light beer and watch Monday night football. It’s just life.

Meanwhile, Skate Nerd similarly positions its subculture in opposition to sports, the archetypical pastime (I infer) of the conformist mainstream. As one t-shirt explains, “If I thought skateboarding was a sport, I never would have started.”

Both of these examples also suggest something that I haven’t really seen addressed yet in academic research on fan cultures and media subcultures (but if you have seen it, please let me know). That is, how do people actually get involved in their interests in the first place? Not just the “moment of epiphany” that I’ve read in some fans’ accounts, but what was going on in the skate nerds’ lives when they “started” skating (unaware that it would later come to be associated with mainstream sports—ironically, largely thanks to Tony Hawk, who also helped mainstream the video game)? What was so relevant to the Art Dorks about “growing up in a pop-culture, sci-fi, kung-fu cornucopia” that made them want to include this in their art?

Just thinking out loud today—no quick answers, but comments are welcome at any point. I’ll be checking out Rejuvenile from the library tomorrow (also brought to my attention by Boing Boing), which will probably offer some food for thought on kids’ culture continuing to engage adults.

Game Politics reports on Sen. Charles Bishop (R) slugging Sen. Lowell Baron (D) on the floor of the Alabama state senate. This comes as a follow-up to an earlier report, since clarified that U.S. senators nearly came to blows over video game legislation.

I was going to let it pass with a chuckle and no further mention, until I noticed that the Decatur Daily’s coverage notes that Bishop “not only exposed the state’s divided Senate to the world, he also provided fodder for pundits and computer geeks”:

YouTube.com carried the video footage, as did blogs all over the state. Early Friday, reporters who cover the Statehouse got e-mails with still images from the scene, including one mock video game cover entitled “ROCK ’EM, SOCK ’EM Battlin’ Senators.”

One nameless lawmaker who had his own verbal battles with Barron wondered if he could capture the video scenes as a computer screen saver.

All you need to do to be a geek these days is use YouTube or keep a blog. Our people are everywhere now. (Photoshopping video game covers has always counted, of course.)

I’m something of a a design geek, but I’m not including any discussion of graphic design in my dissertation. Why? Well, the people whom I talk to who most vocally and centrally identify themselves as geeks/nerds don’t ever refer to design when they talk about “geek culture.” It’s relatively safe to assume that a comic book reader has also watched some anime, that a person who can tell you what 2400 bps means can also quote a few lines from Star Wars, that a self-identified gamer isn’t just talking about video games, and that any of the above felt outside of “the popular crowd” in high school. When I saw video game designer Will Wright give a talk at South by Southwest Interactive, he asked how many of us had played Dungeons and Dragons, and nearly every hand in the room went up, prompting him to say in delight, “Great, you’re all geeks!” I’m not sure he would have had the same response from SXSW attendees at one of the more graphic-design-oriented panels.

Even so, the way people throw around the word ‘geek’ these days, just about anybody can qualify themselves as some sort of geek: design geek, knitting geek, Home and Garden Television geek, etc. This usage just implies some mild self-derision about one’s ability to gush about a topic of interest to only very few other people. It’s not necessarily the level or type of knowledge that make someone geeky nowadays, but the degree to which the knowledge is esoteric. Being excited about obscure stuff can make you feel awkward, but it can also make you feel special.

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According to the OK Cupid “Nerd, Geek, or Dork?” test, I’m a “Pure Nerd” (86 % Nerd, 39% Geek, 30% Dork). When I took it several months ago, I was a “Modern, Cool Nerd”; apparently, working on a dissertation about nerds and geeks can gradually shift one’s score. (Thanks to Jess for bringing this link back to my attention.)

Online comic Cat and Girl rails against “the Berlin Wall of Geekdom”—art geeks versus science geeks.

Geek Monthly has some news announcements befitting today’s date, such as the announcement of a new target demographic:

Said Bond, “We realized Geek was too cool for a whole segment of our potential audience and we want to reach those that are offended by the word geek and are still living in their parents basements and haven’t kissed a girl.

Side note: during my interviews and convention visits, I was fascinated how frequently people make this geek/nerd distinction (though some define it the other way around).