going native in cyberspace

It's just come up several times in the last few days that people experience me as a geek.
Help! I don't wanna be a geek! Maybe it's just me going native, but it's weird to experience it too. To see others who can't relate to my experience. The question is really: how native shall an anthropologist be and how deep shall one delve into another "culture"?

Something else is the validity of my research. Do anthropologists still only do research about people in third world countries? Why is that kind of research more justified than any other? Don't we have to understand ourselves better to be able to understand "the other"?