This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Geek Banter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 13, 2008
It used to be a way of slamming someone to call them a geek. Then the underground geek community found a welcoming home on the internets, and over time we developed pretty well in the land of computers and chat rooms. Of course, in real life, we were still teased, misunderstood, and generally marginalized.
Now, since we (yes us geeks) did such a good job building, massaging, fixing, tweaking, and geeking the internet the rest of the world has become addicted to the online culture. With that addiction has come a bit of understanding and acceptance of geek culture.
That understanding, and acceptance has also led to the idea that being a geek is kinda cool. This is good in some ways and bad in others. An essential part of being a geek is that you are “outside the mainstream”, so if the mainstream becomes geek.. what does that mean? How do you define geekiness when everyone claims geek status.
I hold to the idea that that question will be answered differently depending on what type of geek you ask. For instance, a sci-fi geek will want to have you be able to answer obscure trivia questions about Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and a computer geek will want you to translate binary without looking online. So, I guess on some levels, this transition to “geek being cool” may just lead to there being another type of geek. “The geek Geeks”. Confused. Yeah, so am I. Let me see if I can explain.
Computer geeks are computer geeks because they obsess about computers. So, a Geek geek, would obsess about geeks. Trying to be one, talking about them, and generally jumping on the recent geek bandwagon. That’s cool, I suppose. As geeks, I have found that we are a fairly tolerant group, except when discussing Star Wars Vs. Star Trek, or which OS is better, so we welcome and embrace this new brand of geeks. It is doubtful that they will hang around the clubhouse for long though.
Culture is a fickle mistress who grabs on hard and then quickly moves on. The Geek geeks are really more of a pop culture phenomenon and over time it will dwindle, leaving us to go back to our SciFi, Computers, Chemistry sets, algorithms and general world problem solving responsibilities. Hopefully maintaining bit of understanding and acceptance from the mainstream culture.
In the end we geeks will always be here, and we will always be making the world a better place, so, embrace your inner geek!
When somebody calls you a geek, don’t quibble about stereotypes, but take it as a compliment.
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