NERDTOPIA!
I spent an excellent few hours yesterday with research’s leading metal semiotician Nick Gadsby plotting our “Nerd Culture” workshop at the Research 2011 conference in March. It is not giving away too much to say that we had only the vaguest idea of what we might actually do when we wrote our excitable proposal last year, let alone how it would be interactive. But now we do know these things and it will be, I am confident in saying, totally awesome.
What’s it going to involve? Well, the overall point is that what street fashion, youth subcultures etc were to the offline mainstream, so geek culture is to the online mainstream. Which is a mainstream an awful lot of people are now splashing around in, so it’s a good idea to know more about this stuff.
My conviction about this hardened last year when I was at a conference and some youth researchers were showing a slide of some girl’s facebook wall. They were putting it up to show that The Kids Communicate In Non-Standard English Now, so there was a “gorjuss”, a lot of vowels-for-numbers swapping out, an OMG and a lulz or two. And the researchers said “they’re communicating in language derived from text speak and gangsta rap”. Hein? No they aren’t, I thought, this is the same sort of pidgin l33tspeak with regional inflections you get the Anglophone world over. It has sod all to do with gangsta rap, that’s for sure. What I suspected was happening is that the researchers had got used to a model in which language and style bubbles up from subcultures, moving from cool people to less cool people. But they were looking in the wrong place for their cool people, assuming these deformations of language came from hip-hop because, well, that’s where deformations of language always come from.
It was a really minor point in their presentation and certainly didn’t ruin it, but it got me thinking that there was room for some “Online Culture 101” type workshop or course. So that’s sort of what we’re providing, except we’re linking it to wider ideas of geekdom. Not just so Nick can bring in some of his miniatures, though that’s a part of it.
The session’s going to kick off with ten minutes or so from Nick on the semiotics of nerdery - what we’re talking about, why we’re talking about it, how to spot it. Then there’s three interactive micro-sessions on games, then fandom, then online memes. And then I’ll round the hour out with 5 minutes on geek culture in the square world - places and things where you can see this stuff happening offline or in the mainstream. It’ll be a very intensive session, messy and breakneck and hopefully funny.
We had a bunch of ideas for stuff to talk about but chose games, fandom and memes for two reasons. First of all they each show off something different about what we’re calling “geek culture”. Fandom is about self-definition and how you relate to each other and to a brand or thing. Games are about that too, but they’re also about the history of particular ideas of reward, incentive and success, And memes are about the art this culture produces.
And secondly each of them represents wild or native versions of things researchers are very interested in. As has been much talked about, game mechanics have a lot to offer research in terms of incentivisation, engagement etc but we want to widen the conversation a bit and suggest gaming as a kind of ‘extreme facilitation’. Similarly, fandom is a way of looking at communities, and looking at memes offers a way of thinking about co-creation and collaboration “in the wild”. Plenty of lessons to be learned (we hope!).
So that’s a bit more detail on what we’re going to be doing. If you’re at the MRS, it’ll be on the morning of the second day, so after the Illuminas party: if you are doubtful and hungover rest assured we will probably be too. You never know with workshops whether you’re going to get 5 or 50 people but we’ve worked out a system for scaling what we’re doing. It being a workshop, anyone coming along should be willing to participate as well as spectate (but if there are lots of people not everyone will have to). It will be really fun! You might learn something!
