Friday Q&A: Jason Tocci on his Geek Cultures dissertation

The typical breakdown of nerds and geeks runs on a taxonomy of their interests, says Dr. Jason Tocci, who received his Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication last year, studying the often stereotypical cultural identities.

There’s your manga-fanboys, comic book readers, computer geeks, video game nerds, and so forth.

“But the more I was researching, what I found interesting was how much these groups overlap. The more interesting distinction I was seeing was between stereotypes and how much people internalize them,” Tocci says.

So instead, when Tocci sat down to pen his 400-page dissertation on geek cultures, he decided on a different system of categorization, based on themes in geek culture: the geek as a social misfit; the geek as a genius; the geek as a fan; and the geek as chic.

Tocci, who’s now shopping his research to academic publishers – and who recently moved to Boston to teach at small women’s liberal arts school Pine Manor College - has become an expert studying the culture, which, as readers of this site likely have noticed, is changing rapidly from a once shunned subculture to one of increasing mainstream popularity.

We talked with Tocci earlier this week to get the low-down on the changing landscape and the state of geek cultures in 2010, after the jump.

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