I meant to post this during the first couple weeks of the class, but somehow it slipped through the cracks. The December issue of Wired had an interesting piece from Patton Oswalt on the current state of geek culture, the content and spirit of which both seem to have been co-opted by mainstream culture. This is another articulation of what we’ve talked about as the paradoxical positioning of SF (which seems fairly representative of “geek culture” in a larger sense) as both widespread and marginalized, accepted and ostracized. It’s interesting to think about the ways in which mainstream culture has absorbed not only stereotypically geeky cultural products, but also the spirit of single-minded obsession that seems to define geekdom. Has mainstream culture gotten geekier, and/or have we gotten geekier about mainstream culture? If so, is that a good thing?