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Geeks and Fandoms Becoming Global

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1056499317301311

This article mainly examined cultural considerations of children and adolescents who are involved with commonly stigmatized groups and thus called “geeks.” People who are in these minority groups have historically tended to become more isolated and distant from others in their “offline” life as they avoided discussing these personal interests with others in fear of lasting judgement. However, with the discovery of the internet, children and adolescents can form online communities with others that have the same interests and eventually, this has lead to the cultivation of their own culture, “geek culture”. Prime examples of geek culture include fandoms, cosplay, fanfiction, comics, and gaming. It’s also important to note that a defining characteristic of geek culture is “obsessive interest and knowledge in a given field.”

In terms of networking and social media as platforms for this geek culture to perpetuate and evolve, this has lead a lot of people to branch out of their normal relationships and eventually create a giant interpersonal network by bridging thousands of weak ties together. Through this, the Internet has given the ability to further solidify the concept of the “small world phenomenon” as now strangers who would’ve originally have no incentive to meet others from across the world are continuously connecting and forming these friendships. However, the formation of the geek culture is not all positive as increasingly, fandoms for example, have been having incredibly intense fights against each other across a global scale. This has lead to large interpersonal positive and negative relationships amongst all of the groups that are not stable. Many groups will all have beef against each other but temporarily align with another group just to battle against the third party that both dislike more, following the structural balance theory that in a triangle connection, all negative edges are considered “unstable” and won’t forever last but stable triangles can include two negative relationships with one positive.

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