The Weekend Review: American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

2009 at 10am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Weekends are busy, right?  So I’m trying this new format for weekend reviews, more of a quick hit approach. Tell me what you think!

Now available in paperback from Scribner (a division of Simon and Schuster)

The Quick & Dirty

Former nerd Benjamin Nugent sets out to “take a serious approach to a subject usually treated lightly, which is a nerdy thing to do.”  American Nerd is a sociological exploration of the history, subcultures, rules, and rituals of nerdiness in which Nugent examines media depictions of nerdiness and their impact on how we conceptualize nerds and nerd culture(s).

The Big Ideas

“Nerdiness isn’t really a matter of intellectualism and social awkardness.” Instead, Nugent contends that there are two types of nerds: a mostly male group who are intellectual in a way that is perceived as machinelike—capable of thinking but not feeling—and that cripples their ability to socialize and a group comprised equally of males and females who are made nerds “by sheer force of social exclusion.”

Many groups of nerds are united by a desire to remove the ambiguity from human interactions and spoken language. This contributes to their appearance of being machinelike and to the idea that many nerds prefer computers over people. It also contributes to nerds’ preferences for games like Dungeons & Dragons and for “rule-bound, rational communication.” But there are things going on beneath the surface that compel individuals to seek out these types of groups and interactions.  Nugent recounts knowing several nerds whose homelives were so unstable that the appeal of fantasy games and “a heavily rule-bound universe” become easily understandable. So, nerdiness is not necessarily inborn; it can be a product of nurture just as much as it is of nature.

Society’s distinctions between thinking and feeling “making people who are good at reasoning…appear as if they’re not entitled to a normal emotional life.” Nerds know that other people accept this dualism, and when they accept it themselves and become concerned with how others perceive them, they become self-loathing. Enter the self-fulfilling prophecy through which nerds come to believe they are incapable of social interaction, through which they buy into society’s denial of their sexuality and interpersonal needs. This is a problem.

But nerds need love too! And high school debate competitions are evidence of this. Why? Because debate is fun, but it “is also something nerds do in order to meet other nerds they can hit on.” The second part of American Nerd, titled “Among the Nerds,” is more memoir than sociological study, and Nugent’s account of a debate competition is quite humorous.

Though often arbitrary, some definitions and depictions of nerdiness serve social and political functions. Nugent explores the history of the word nerd and its association with various racial and ethnic groups, showing that nerdiness is a stop along the road to prosperity. When new groups first come to America, they often work jobs that consist mostly of unthinking activity—menial tasks and manual labor. Then they study hard and swing to the other end of the spectrum by becoming nerdy before finally reaching the destination of WASPy well-roundedness. Of course, not all groups follow this trajectory, but it’s an interesting idea. Groups in power have sought to depict other groups as nerdy as a way to make them less of a threat.

Other Fun Stuff

• Nugent credits Saturday Night Live with being most influential in defining modern representations of nerds, and he gives the TV series Freaks and Geeks credit for showing that nerds are people, too. It “took a network audience accustomed to hot people solving problems and instead asked them to find beauty in unhot people learning to deal with the insolubility of problems.”

• Hipster culture seeks to employ “the cultural capital of quirk” by co-opting “nerdiness as an aesthetic.”  Put simply, hipster cliches like big glasses, high jeans, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and purist obsessions

Connote sophistication and cosmopolitanism by screaming “We are not cosmopolitan! We are not culturall sophisticated!

• Nugent briefly explores the “ideological component” of the increased diagnosis of Asperger’s and autism spectrum disorders and how they are related to social definitions of nerdiness, masculininity, and the importance of empathy. I found these ideas very interesting and wanted Nugent to expound on them further.

• Depictions of nerds in literature extend back several hundred years. Nugent explores some from Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and  P.G. Wodehouse, among others, and I loved it!

The Bottom Line

American Nerd is a fun read that is part sociological exploration and part memoir. Though a bit dry at times, it is generally enjoyable, always interesting, and rather creative. Recommended for readers who enjoy a modern take on niche cultural anthropology and for anyone who has ever felt nerdy. Isn’t that all of us?