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Meek Geeks

Fri, 2008-05-23 13:57 — Mark Dow

David Brooks wrote a spot-on opinion column in the NY Times today, "The Alpha Geeks ". Brooks is an influential journalist, button-down political pundit, and cultural commentator. Among many other accomplishments he is credited with coining the terms bobo, red state and blue state.

"The Alpha Geeks"describes the changing meaning of the terms "nerd" and "geek", from Dr. Seuss and Fonzie's utterances of "nerd", to Harry Potter's role in geek empowerment. He argues that geek is the new cool, a strange irony for us old geeks -- our self-image is centered on not being cool.

"They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated. In “The Laws of Cool,” Alan Liu writes: “Cool is a feeling for information.” When someone has that dexterity, you know it."

Brooks asserts that "The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party." While I agree with the tilted playing field in bipartisan politics ("Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes"), I've seen several signs that he's off the mark for preteens. Perhaps he hasn't lurked on sites like Club Penguin or forumarena.

I've been noticing that geek ethic is now infiltrating many fields, from medicine to art. For example the "Discovering Biology in a Digital World" blog today solicited media entries for Medicine 2.0 that "consider the impacts of web 2.0 on medicine and healthcare":

  • Are you talking with doctors about sexually transmitted diseases in Second Life?
  • Have you had your genome sequenced? Do your doctors send you e-mail?
  • Are you using web technologies to measure your food consumption and calorie burning?

Geek (algorithmic) art is another genre that has accelerated nerd ascendancy into a new domain. Here's a meta-geek art piece that comments on geek field creep.

2008-06-25 

Wikipedia has a range of geek roots and flavor. Not surprisingly it has thoughtful entries on the range of nerd and geek characteristics and cultural attitudes.

From Boing Boing Sound of Young America interviews "American Nerd" author:

Jesse Thorn says:

Benjamin Nugent is the author of American Nerd: The Story of My People. It's a book on nerds that's part history, part sociology, part reportage and part memoir. Nugent traces the history of the nerd, from the antagonists of romanticism in the 19th century to the classic Hollywood nerds of the 1970s and 80s to the "geek pride" and "nerd hipster" classes of today. He also writes movingly about his own childhood, and that of the friends with whom he played role-playing games as a middle school student.
The Sound of Young America interviews "American Nerd" author Benjamin Nugent

 

2008-11-03 

John Hodgman's take on the geek power shift, "VOTE GEEK", posted on boing-boing.

Alex Sramek's comment on this post is a brilliant insiders look at the fine distinctions between nerd and geek:

"I wouldn't say nerd is a subset of geek. They are overlapping groups. Some people are one, some the other, some both, some neither.

For that matter, I might suggest that nerdiness and geekiness spectra exist, to which a large portion of the population belongs at one point or another.

For example, suggesting that such spectra exist and that geekiness and nerdiness aren't simple "you are or you aren't" categories would put me in about the middle of the geek spectrum. Realizing that nerd and geek may not be independent variables, but rather require higher math to accurately represent their causal relationships, would get me partially into the nerd spectrum. Actually modeling these functions would put me irrevocably deeper into the nerd spectrum, with further geek spectrum points for providing a spiffy interactive 3D chart.

Realizing that I just had said discussion and realizing the nerdiness and geekiness of this all gives me geek points and loses me nerd points for the well-adjusted-geek trait of geeky-nerdy awareness and acceptance. Noticing the self-referential nature of this puts me deeper into the geek spectrum and not so far into the nerd one. Becoming unnerved that this now taints the original results and quite possibly leads to an x-approaching-infinity series, and hypothesizing at where the limit may lie, puts me permanently into the furthest, most hopeless depths of the nerd spectrum, a point which is rendered moot by the sheer length of this post.

The fact that I realize how lame this whole post is makes me more of a geek than a nerd, though."

 

 

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