Is it just me, or does the world of education seem to have a PR issue nowadays? Wasn’t attending college and other forms of higher education an act of stability? The, for lack of a better pun, most educated life decision for the average person? The thing we all grew up knowing we would do, as a given, assuming you were not in a financial situation which made it not possible?

Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. This is more speculative than some of my articles, and, perhaps, it is the biased media that swings my perspective in this direction, but everywhere you go, you hear about problems of employing people. Of people coming out of schools not actually fit for the job they were hired and trained to do. And, of course, the one-thousand-pound elephant in the room which is the dreaded “Student Loan Debt.”

Now, some degrees, some would say, were always useless for an actual paying job. The English major or the human studies major or the art history kid working at the range of fast food joints like the ones on Gulf to Bay right out of higher education is a prevalent stereotype. But the problem now seems to extend to many potential vocations.

And, again, this could be the media/internet inflating a situation beyond what is happening. Confirmation bias or panic or shoddy surveys. The unemployment or wrong employment numbers are not concrete. It would not surprise me if the employment rates and dropout rates for college and high school were much less scary than what’s told. Fear sells after all.

But, I kind of doubt it’s that far off the mark. I know how we compare to other countries in all our major subjects. It makes sense.

And... this is a PR nightmare for a lot of groups, and it feeds into common economic worries. If schools are not trusted as much, and, indeed, if being so far into debt is such a Faustian bargain, you get less and less people enthused about attending schools. And, if less and less attend, or bother to give it their mental all when they do attend, the people who can vouch for the benefits of higher education become fewer and fewer.

The result is we get stupider as a nation. If the schools aren’t already contributing to that problem.  

But, that’s not the end of it. Because the companies hiring also have an issue: when school is not a useful measuring stick anymore they lose stability. How do you determine who to hire when you can’t trust credentials? You must smile and take your chances or take the huge amount of time to test every single person interested in a job.

And they have a similar problem if they do trust the schools. Because, apparently, they’re not getting the best people always, and with fewer applicants to choose from, the competition will get more and more difficult to decide upon. And then, as a smart business, they’d only hire the already experienced, and the youth then don’t have jobs, and everyone gets mad at them for not having jobs, and people go on support mechanisms like welfare.

This sounds like a slippery slope argument, and it kind of is, but the situation has doom and gloom. It’s not PR anyone wants, especially not the ones who oversee the children and young adults forming the next generation.

And, I hate to be the complainer. But it’s not something I personally can help fix outside of discussing it. The only answer is not an easy one. The education system would need sweeping reform and change. To improve itself and its PR so people trust it more again. And then make the debt it causes not so crippling. It’s not an issue easily brushed under the rug. You can’t slap an A+ on it and hope for the best.

But here’s the funny thing, and the hopeful thing. The people equipped to do it, to solve it, might not be from the biggest, most well-funded places. People already smart enough to do what needs doing exist somewhere. We need to find them and accept their solutions even if their accreditations aren’t top notch. And then we can get the world back to where accreditation means something concrete again.

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More than one form of advertising exists. Some of it is specific to companies, made by them, and set to sell something. But, there exists another type of advertising…one not meant to get across the idea to spend money, but to make someone out as more and more powerful.

And, in the today, in the now, with the media landscape as it is, that advertising focuses squarely on celebrities. And sure, that’s not new news, but who can be a celebrity has changed. First off, fame has layers now, more than ever. If you go into the maelstrom that is YouTube, you will find plenty of people who you could certainly call famous, and yet, outside of their subculture, the random person will not even know their names. Besides, perhaps, the children of the local high schools like Clearwater Academy International, Washburn Academy, The Learning Connection, Delphi Academy, or the simply named: Clearwater High School. But that is not the everyman population of the work-a-day world.

Subcultures grow through, and some become common enough random people know them. And, I’m sure you have already guessed going off this article’s title which subculture got enough advertising for the news and the world to give them more than a passing glance: the nerds. The geeks. The dweebs. When else in history does the average person not only recognize who people like Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson are, but has also seen them interact with the media at large?

In what other world—because this age does seem like a new world—does the author of a fantasy series become a household name (and the fact you probably thought of a different person than I intended proves my point)? Actors can become known not for who they are, but for what nerdy character they play.

This is the new nerd, the bigger than life nerd. For some beautiful reason, the outrageous, obsessive, risk-taking social rejects get all sorts of documentaries made about them. Gets major actors playing them in multi-million dollar films.

For an easy example, I can’t imagine any other situation where something like The Imitation Game would not only be a movie, but a movie which glorifies not the smooth overly square-jawed man in a three-piece suit, but the hard-working smart guy who almost no one likes to be in the room with.

You can make all the derisive comments about the “special snowflakes” and the “precious millennials” you desire, but we are in a world which is now advertising that perhaps we need a little less of the men who waddle in and take out many with guns, and more of the clever and odd and the nerdy.

Nerds love a good power fantasy, perhaps because for a long time they did not feel powerful (like many other groups). But now, along with other “minorities” of subcultures and actual minorities which were marginalized, being us, being nerds, is taken by advertising to be a power fantasy.

And I think we could get used to that.

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If you liked this article, you can read more of Brandon Scott’s work over at The Hive, or on his website: www.coolerbs.com    

When I said advertising from Disney made nerd culture spread faster, I was not just pointing at them because they are a large company, and an easy source of reference for the average reader—though that was a perk. I chose them because they own Marvel. And if one franchise could bare the label of what made nerds cool, that would be it.

The Avengers changed everything. Changed how the movie industry regarded interconnected stories and franchises. It made spin-offs and connected television shows more wanted. No matter how many of the D.C. movies like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice or Suicide Squad flop critically, the amount of power and money The Avengers made makes the pull too strong to not keep trying.

The logic is this: do it right, just once, and it will all be worth it.

And, as the corporations and the money-hungry eyeball-demanders fight, we all get new stuff.

Now, the backlash is (because there is always backlash) some nerds begrudge the people who suddenly have an opinion on the argument of D.C. versus Marvel, or whether “gamer girls” are in it for some sort of popularity spike among the stereotypical hormone-jacked basement dwellers.

But I am not one of those people. I think it is fantastic when anyone gets into this subculture that’s not “sub” anymore. Because, now, seeing something like Doctor Strange or Rogue One: A Star Wars Story or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a go-to movie for the masses.

But that wasn’t the only thing they did for the “revolution.” Another way Disney directly spread the agenda is with the amount of merchandising and branded items they let into the world. This is basic trademark building, something I’ve spoken about before, but it is still worth pointing out that for every Captain America’s mighty shield they sell, they are advertising.

Every sale. Every television advertisement. Every time someone walks into the comic book shop at Countryside, or wanders to that back part of the Barnes and Noble at Sunset Point and finds the wall of graphic novels, they are at the risk of the “infection.”

And I could keep shouting out all the examples which I think are radical, and if I had a megaphone, that might be something I’d do with it. But the point is this: Disney is big enough and wide enough and tied enough to the collective consciousness of the masses, that if they put out something, it is normal.

I say Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to anyone who is not a rather young child, and they will know exactly what I am talking about. The movie is a piece of us as Americans. And Disney can do that anytime they want with anything. Disney decided that comic book superheroes are common to us. And so, boom, they are.

And while that is scary to think about in terms of non-media implications, we nerds got picked as the target for elevation, so I’m not going to complain. I just hope they decide to further destigmatize video games next. Because that would be, again using this old silly word: radical.

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If you liked this article, you can read more of Brandon Scott’s work over at The Hive, or on his website: www.coolerbs.com    

Nerds rule the world in 2017. And that’s because, with the right advertising and marketing, the label lost its stigma in almost all aspects. Everyone, yes, everyone, is practically a nerd now. Shows like the Walking Dead and Stranger Things are both hugely popular, Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone is perhaps the most read book behind the Christian bible and (regrettably) Fifty Shades of Grey, and the more I say about the current movie scene in relation to nerd culture, the more I prove my point.

It’s pervasive. It’s so easy to get into, just by osmosis. Rampant recommendations from friends and family, and the new prevalence of getting media quick, easily, and “binge-able,” makes it so anyone can enter the nerd fold with little to no issue. They may not even realize that’s what happened to them.

For instance: Game of Thrones is a fantasy series with dragons and magic. And twenty (or so) years ago, being that kind of person, the kind who likes stories like George R.R. Martin’s, would be a thing open to derision. A fringy mindset. But, now you can call yourself a nerd or geek and it’s a badge of honor, with many coming into the fold every day.

But, how did this happen? When did it become normal? What began the situation where you could wander into Countryside Mall, and there is not one, but two video game stores, and a comic book store, and a nerdy memorabilia store, which all attract not only the teenage and young adult boys you’d expect, but middle-aged women and teenage girls, and little children, and full-blown working nine-to-five adults.

Again, that all may seem normal now, but it wasn’t before.

And the reason, at least from the perspective of an everyman, who was and is in the thick of it, is a crashing, intersecting, explosion of a few factors. A stew of the following (and certainly more) made it possible: streaming services, the internet, and the entertainment industry. And the smell of this stew wafted to the noses of the majority on the backs of advertising from companies, a lot of it originating from the Disney corporation, and they all wanted a taste.

Keep in mind, some of this is speculation, but I think I’m not too far off. The internet made connecting nerds easier, and once they connected, it made organizing them possible, coming together into big enough congregations that people took notice. Comic Con and Dragon Con and E3 might have a lot to do with the outcome. YouTube sharing related videos wide and fast certainly had something to do with the outcome. And stores took notice and stocked shelves with these demographics in mind. Pop brand figurines, for instance, are ubiquitous now in most retail shops.

Advertising, at its simplest form, is the act of making something known. And, with some of the most creative people around today working on the new wave of nerdy products (fed on a steady diet of nerdy creations in their youth), they made it mass market known.

Nerds have always understood nerdy things are spectacular. And, it turns out, so does most of everyone, as soon as they are exposed to it without judgment.

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If you liked this article, you can read more of Brandon Scott’s work over at The Hive, or on his website: www.coolerbs.com    

Well, Carrie Fisher and her mother both passed away a day apart. And hopefully, hopefully, that marks a capstone on a year which some people on the internet refer to as a “dumpster fire,” though I don’t promote that label. But, if we can just make it to the end of the year without any more tragedies or celebrity deaths that would be good.

That would be wonderful.

And, if we can make the coming year a little more in the vein of hope than despair, that would be nice too.

In fact, that’s what I am here to promote as my final article of the year. Because 2016 has been harsh. Even for someone growing okay with Donald being the new President of the United States of America, I shed a few tears over the sheer brutalizing we all received.

But, it’s almost over. And, so, like the optimist I did not think I was (but continue to prove myself wrong), I am all for us, as people, going forward to promote a year without so much suffering.

We are not defined by only our tragedies, we are also by our triumphs. Our successes. Our striving for a new and better world.

Now, on to how to go about it—even locally. Here in Clearwater we may not have seen much direct change. We are a sleepy town, which isn’t always affected the hardest by news. But, that doesn’t mean some don’t need a little hope and light.

So, here’s what I promote. First: a little calm. Sure, the political world was loud and will continue to be loud, but that does not mean we need to listen so close. Take care of yourself, mentally and physically. And, I know it sounds a little odd, especially coming from a future-excited, technology-promoting individual like me, but you don’t have to engage with news media, or even social media for a little while if it is genuinely hurting you. If you need it, distance yourself. Shut off all connected devices.

Ignoring the news may not be a socially responsible thing to suggest doing, but there will always be something on it dire and distracting and infuriating, and you can remove yourself from it for a few days, even a few weeks. It’s not like it’s going anywhere.

And the second thing I promote is to just be kind. Dark, bad things happen in the world, an unavoidable fact, and though we can’t always prevent them from happening, we can calm people and try to keep individuals from flipping out and going into a panic.

Yes, protest and standing up against injustice are right things to do. I promote that too. I promote peaceful assembly and making grievances known—especially for the underrepresented. But, I mean kindness in the day to day, not the dramatic situations. Understand that people are still reeling and try to have empathy for them without yourself falling into the same emotional spiral.

Part of the reason the world seems so chaotic this year is because of the amount of screaming happening among friends and family and perfect strangers. Fear mongering media didn’t help either. On all sides, people talked about how bad it is. This time, though not every tragedy is avoidable, or even logical, we can hold together instead of yelling and breaking apart.

If 2016 is a time of anger and upheaval, then I promote 2017 as the year of understanding and love. Yeah, it sounds a little hippy-like, but I’m willing to try it. What can it hurt to strive for peace? Really all years we should strive for that, so we may as well start somewhere.

So, why not this year, so full of yet untapped potential?

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If you liked this article, you can read more of Brandon Scott’s work over at The Hive, or on his website: www.coolerbs.com