>A list member is (presumably) part of the community; Joe User, on the
>other hand, isn't. Often, these Joe Users aren't receptive to just being
>pointed to the relevant information; they need to be walked through it.
>Occasionally, and this is what gets up the nose of many technically savvy
>people, they *demand* to be walked through it.
i think geekazoids ought to take responsibility for participating in the creation of a culture in which people feel they can't possibly do it themselves. shall i tell you about my high school computer course some more. were those boys/men who treated me as a dumb bimbo blonde at all at fault for treating me as if i didn't belong there? how about the guy who pressed keys and did everything for me when i was trying to figure out how to run regressions of the mainframe?
it's the same line i spout re everything else. i constantly have to walk the line between academic culture and my family/friends who know little about it. translating, constantly. i used to commute to school daily and feel as if i crossed some imaginary line between two worlds. i also tend not to hang around lefties on a daily basis, so don't always take for granted the notion that "why shoot, everybody just has to know the path to enlightenment. i don't know, but experiences like that make you acutely aware of the beginnings.
geek culture used to--i think that's changing--valorize a kind of separatism , a kind of nietzschean transvaluation of values that turns out to be individualist to its core in many ways, despite the patina of communitarianism. and, aside from that, a read of alan wolfe, much disparaged, will give you some insight into why communitarianism and individualism go hand in hand.
frankly, i find the tendency to individualize the whole thing as if individuals who don't "get it" are morally bankrupt pretty damn ridiculous for lefties who are supposed to have some sort of ability to provide _structural_ explanations for social phenomena.
feh.
kelley