Comments | wombat_socho: Geek Social Fallacies

wombat_socho

Geek Social Fallacies

Jun 12, 2010 15:14

Went out to PRSFS last night; meeting was in the ass-end of Cheverly, practically in digex' back yard, and since I'd agreed to give one of the members a lift home to Vienna, it seemed only reasonable to get together with P, who is on her three-day weekend from working the midnight shift. The PRSFS meeting...hm. On the one hand, I like talking about ( Read more... )

the bush of fandom, prsfs, family drama

Comments 16

polaris93 June 12 2010, 21:55:52 UTC

It's not just geeks who contract these ailments. There's a developmental stage we all go through where these are normal attitudes and behaviors, but most of us grow out of them by the time we get out of high school, or even much sooner. It's the people who get stuck that way . . .

wombat_socho June 12 2010, 22:30:41 UTC

An argument has been made that most people involved in fandom (science fiction or otherwise) are socially retarded. After almost 35 years of being involved with SF and (more recently) anime fandom, I tend to agree.

polaris93 June 12 2010, 22:39:29 UTC

You have something there. I have encountered more social awkwardness, gauche behavior, cluelessness, and social stupidity among s-f and other fans than just about anywhere else. Also, a disturbing number of them haven't even a nodding acquaintance with the world's great literature, even that of Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne, or any knowledge of most of the great s-f/fantasy/horror writers of the 1920s, 1930s, and early-to-mid 1940s, such as C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Abraham Merritt, and others. Their fan interests are always confined to one or another extremely narrow sub-sub-sub-genre to the exclusion of all else. Thirty years ago, fans were always reading everything not nailed down, regardless of genre, though they had their preferences, of course. They'd read at least some literature -- Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne, Chekov, Dostoyefsky, Thomas Mann, Cervantes, others, whether in translation or in the original -- and a lot of classic poetry, and were well-acquainted with the world's mythologies. Now -- nada. Empty air ( ... )

wombat_socho June 12 2010, 23:15:16 UTC

I am inclined to think that the Internet, for all its failings, has actually helped anime fans avoid a lot of the social awkwardness that used to be a defining characteristic of SF fandom. I could be wrong about that and they might be just displaying a different kind of geek social failure. ;)

As to the ignorance of SF fans of anything outside their narrow subgenre of interest, including classic literature, this has its roots in two related issues, both broadly described as "the treason of the clerks", a phrase Jerry Pournelle used to describe the failure/refusal of the public schools and universities to transmit the culture of the Anglosphere to American kids of the 1960s and forward. Much like the public schools and universities, SF fans of the 1960s failed to teach the Star Trek and Star Wars fans who came into fandom about the rich literary history of SF and fantasy. That was forty years ago, and since then we've had more waves of fans who came to fandom by way of TV and movies, few of whom have any exposure to Heinlein, Asimov, ( ... )

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