Mr. Ebert, what have you done?

Roger Ebert is a greatly respected movie critic, an erudite chap and, more to the point, a good read.

He transgressed one of the Laws of the Internet recently. Thou Shalt Not Mock The Nerds is a good rule to operate by when online - not that you have anything to fear, but if you Mock then you can expect to have your inbox slowly fill up with hate-spam. There is no rage like nerd-rage.

Mr. Ebert has contributed to the stereotyping of a section of society that he feels are lacking.
The belittling of a social group because of a choice of self identification is wrong. If the group he were talking down to had made public their sexual, gender, ethnic or religious identity, we'd be looking at a lawsuit. Not from the individual, but surely a pressure group would have stepped in by now.

Ebert feels safe because fandom doesn't have teeth. IGetting fans to agree on anything is like nailing jelly to a ceiling.

If I were feeling spikey, I would suggest that writing a deft, pithy, entertaining review isn't a license to Other people.

Which is what he's attempted to do.

Suggesting that fans are in a cultural "dead end", that their Otaku collection and mastery of trivia, and their social ineptness makes them lesser. No one has to worry about offending them, they have no pride, they have no lives and to stand up to answer back is to invite ridicule. As long as everyone is reasonably sure it's not a variant of Autism.

He says that being a Fan these days is more about celebrating yourself, and that fans talk in quotes.

When Fandom talks in scripts, talks in quotes, what's really happening? Ebert talks about not having to ad-lib, but how much human conversation is ad-lib anyway?

Not much.

Think about the conversations you've had today. When we meet an acquaintance, what happens? We ask how that person is. If you're interested in Hacking the language when someone asks you how you are, tell them. Go for it. They probably didn't want to know about your incipient cold or the state of your love life - and oh god, the looks you get when you do enumerate the things that are wrong with you. You strayed from the path and now the conversation is deep in bandit country.

Conversation is a dying art, we're told, but it's really important to know who you're talking to and what it's safe to talk about so that you keep that vital social acceptance. It's built into Americans in High School, I imagine the same thing happens in other cultures at roughly the same time - as you construct your identity during your teens you also set patterns that will follow you for the rest of your life, patterns that are comfortable and safe, patterns that allow you to ask the question "are you like me?" of everyone you meet. If you want to call it tribal, or clannish, you can.

So why is it bad?

It's not. It's low tech RFID, social GPS. The main reason that Roger doesn't like 'em is that he doesn't like the source. If you can weave Kipling, Keats, Shakespeare, Milton, Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Russell, Marx (Karl and Groucho alike) into conversation you're Educated. You might even be Urbane and Witty. But dropping Lucas, Roddenberry, Spielberg, Snyder, Davies or Moffat, Moore or Whedon into a conversation makes you a hopeless fanboy, one of the Morlocks.

I have the distinct impression that this isn't going to change. A prejudice is hard to shake off, and by the time the works of people like Alan Moore are being spoken of in the same context as Wells and Verne, Roger Ebert and I will probably be long dead.