The Geek Attraction to Cultural Difference

Today I had a social outing with co-workers. Now, very rarely will I talk about personal or work details on this blog, if I do at all. This is mostly because I do not want to blend personal and work affairs with the internet. There are, after all, more and more people who do background checks by using online search tools. To have someone I potentially need to network with find out that I totally meant to stuff a server with cream cheese and turn it on as a joke, well – I just can’t have that (hey, that too is a joke, by the way – stop backing away slowly).

But this is one of those rare occurrences, because it’s a general topic that bears some thought. Today’s social outing was an attempt to get people to experience something different that the rest of us had, and that was the nuances of another culture. Japanese was the flavor of the day, as we went to a Japanese style food court and grocery store, attempted to travel to a Japanese toy store, and eventually ended up at a Japanese sushi restaurant, server “kaiten” style where sushi comes around on a conveyor belt and you pay by the plate.

Even though my entire department are all healthy geeks, only a few of us had really experienced, were familiar with, and enjoyed Japanese culture. It got me to thinking why some geeks are attracted to something like Japanese culture. It seems obvious that those geeks out there who like Japanese animation and comics would eventually become curious about the cultural influence behind them.  I think, however, that there are reasons why geeks are so keen on something different from their own stuff.

By nature, geeks are obsessives, but they are also dreamers. They use interest in things the mainstream is not to build their own identity, provide a level of escapism, or simply look for something that is perhaps better than being all about their own native culture’s leanings. It can be computers, anime and manga, games, and much more. To be honest, it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it is something that a geek can claim as different than the social norm. For example, if you asked most if not all geeks whether or not they thought Perez Hilton should have been struck by Will.I.Am’s manager for calling Will a “f***ot”, they’d react in one of two ways – A)Who cares about a celebrity trash blogger like Perez Hilton or B)He had it coming. There’s also always the possibility of C)Who? as well. But tell them that their favorite anime series is being cancelled, or that a vendor won’t support drivers for their OS anymore, or that a major content patch is going to ruin their game, and they’ll be all up in arms.

I’d say we geeks shun pop culture because there isn’t much depth or ability to pick it apart due to everyone making it, well, popular. Everyone’s talking about it, you eitther agree or disagree, and you move on. But something like foreign culture, the nuances of a roleplaying game, or other such things aren’t norms. They require thought and the kind of mind that appreciates taking something apart and putting it back together. They require a sort of agility to understand and accept things that are not their own and also to be a bit adventurous.

Putting aside all of these things, however, geeks like different cultures and norms because they are not what you’d normally experience in everyday life. The Japanese culture in particular has many things that are different about it that are completely foreign to those outside of it, which is an attraction to many budding geeks looking for a new fix of something they haven’t experienced before. That being said – there’s a difference between liking something because it’s different and appreciating it for being different. The former makes you a trend whore, and the latter makes you an open-minded person. I’d like to think that most geeks pursue the “different” for the second of the two reasons, and even if it may sometimes cost them mainstream friends and opportunities, most of us don’t seem to mind that at all.