Shocking Pink ([info]fionnghuala) wrote,
@ 2008-06-10 18:34:00
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Current mood: write-y

Hide and Seek
Had hoped as I was posting yesterday about the Hide and Seek festival, that it would filter into my consciousness and I'd realise that not only did I think it would be cool to go, I actually could go, and would get my arse in gear to do it.

Then I noticed that it's the same weekend as my Big Conference, so there's no way I can.

Which means it's also the same weekend as Glastonbury. Which seems a shame as the two have superficially similar remits. So then I started to wonder what this means. Why would avoiding this clash not be important to the organisers?

I guess because there isn't a big feeling that their audience would want to go to both, despite the apparent similar appeal. Two main reasonings I can think of:

1)Glastonbury is over, and is no longer about art and creativity and fun and innovation, but is just a few gigs and other entertainments happening on top of each other.

2)Hide & Seeks audience are not the kind of people who would go to Glastonbury. (1) can be kind of subsumed into this, but more a statement of a kind of geek, gamer maybe intellectual culture being a separate one from whatever Glastonbury represents; perhaps more of a crusty or indy or outdoorsy or even just music-interest culture.

This relates to some stuff I've been thinking today about what geek culture is. I'm imagining some kind of perfect internet user who stands in opposition to the stuff I'm interested in about fluffing it up.


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[info]fionnghuala
2008-06-12 02:18 pm UTC (link)
That's a really interesting story! I think it's a much more common kind of story for women, which is one of the reasons they always have a bit of an outsider status in geek-dom, that it's later in life, or when a specific opportunity presents itself that women become familiar with computer etc!

One of the reason I quite enjoy these gamer conferences is because you get to see the whole ecology of these systems in one place. Even the really hardcore women talk about things like feeling anxiety when they play an online game, that people will see that they aren't good enough, or even just that they won't know the etiquette of it.

Thanks for the encouragement ;) At the moment I'm calling this character The Hacker, but I might have to come up with some less generic name in a bit. It's very Literary Criticism or maybe Cultural Studies style, rather than Sociology which is more my training and a bit less playful, so I'm not quite sure where to go with it...

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[info]minnesattva
2008-06-12 04:24 pm UTC (link)
And to be fair a lot -- not all! by any means -- of that geekiness was due to the guy I was dating; he got into Linux then and installed it on my laptop when he borrowed it for a while... but of course I would've have been interested in befriending/dating geeks, or in Linux (he did ask me before he put it on my computer!) if I hadn't already been sort of a geek myself.

I tried very hard to be a humanities student when I was in college, and I would've done something a lot like this if given the chance (my school wasn't big enough to have departments for things like Cultural Studies, though my English degree had (far too much for me!) Literary Criticism. If my experiences had been more like what you're talking about here I would've probably liked it a lot better.

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