I suppose it's true, being a self-ascribed geek doesn't lend itself to saying anything else. But I have to wonder about this cruelness and bullying that the author of the above article keeps referring to. I didn't see first hand any nastiness between cliques (although there were plenty within), and even though voting for class president was inevitably a popularity contest, there was no overt backstabbing.
Every situation is different. Sure, the cliques were mutually exclusive, but that didn't mean that they all acted like autonomous countries contantly at war with each other. Despite being a bit of a loner and a wallflower and a geek, I was, in a way, popular because everyone knew who I was (leaving aside the fact that my type of popularity was more like where everyone knows there are overhead lights but never notices unless the light suddenly blows out) because I was in a minority clique. To be more accurate, the minority cliques were popularity cliques. This included the political and jock cliques as well as the nerds (there were a few exceptions, but these exceptions mostly consisted of people who were popular on their looks alone and nothing else).
By far, the majority were the masses, the "regular" Joes and Janes who simply cared about getting through the day and not grades or sports or the student council. If anything, high school resembled more like pre-Revolutionary France than Lord of the Flies. The aristocracy were the minority cliques and the peasants were everyone else. I'm sure all those other people had cliques of their own, but being part of the minority, I was too far removed from that to notice or care. I'm sure that if anyone who used to be a nerd, jock, or politico were asked today, they wouldn't know either.
So if I had to reclassify the nerds, I wouldn't say that they were persecuted (this may have been different for the "nerds" of the masses), instead there was more of a weary respect--sort of like how people had a respect for the aristocractic religious sect for their religious knowledge. The nerds may have been made fun of, but only behind their backs.
What I found interesting was that the dog-eat-dog situation applied more aptly when there are only nerds around. When this occurs, the nerds segregate themselves according to obsession, much like grouping numbers because they're even, odd, prime, or divisible by five. And because there's no real way to quantify someone as being better than another because everyone is equally socially inept, the battle turns to which obsession is "cooler" than the other.
In other words, what do you like better, painting still lifes or juggling?
In other news: Google Buys Pyra. I was surprised. At least Blogger wasn't bought by AOL.
