The Rise of Geekdom

cynagh0st writes "In what can only be described as the biggest newsflash for the Slashdot community since Microsoft was sued: It is the age of the geek. New York Times Op-Ed columnist and author David Brooks writes a brief article that can be best summed up in the following: All your culture are belong to us. In the article proper he summarizes the rise to power and discusses a technocratic geek dominance on the social construct. He writes, '... the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds ... 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 ... There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.'" I'm thinking Brooks must have been AFK for the 2nd half of the 90s when this started. To be more precise, late 97 ;)

Comments

Aw, furrfu!

[Megane]

Looks like geekdom has gone mainstream now. Great. Now I gotta find something else to be. I guess otaku still has a couple of years left, though the folks over in Akihabara are probably going to end up making that mainstream too before long.

And as for 1997, I had a Fidonet BBS back in 1993, then fixed IP DSL since early 2000.

Rise and fall and rise of the geek cool aesthetic

[xPsi]

The geek-nerd cool aesthetic can be modeled as a rising line of constant slope (b) with a sinusoidal oscillation whose angular frequency (w) and amplitude (d) must be determined by other socio-economic factors: a+bt+dsin(wt)

In other words, being a geek comes in and out of fashion, but there is an overall rising trend. For example, back in my day (the 80s) movies like Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds, and Weird Science, along with the rise in popularity of the personal computer, role playing games, etc. were all evidence for the geek empowerment movement.

While I agree we are in a local maximum for the geek aesthetic where software engineers and programmers are like the supermodels of geek culture, the true litmus test for the Age of the Geek will be when a physics major can proudly say so at a party and not have everyone take two steps back. This has never been true, and I see no evidence of this yet.

Re:Geeks still get beat up..

[psychodelicacy]

Absolutely.

I was interested that TFA cited Harry Potter as a kind of geek icon. Either they didn't read the books, or they think that "geek" = "wearing eyeglasses fixed with sticky-tape". Harry Potter is always doing badly at his classes, is more interested in sports than books, and leaves all the really clever stuff to Hermione. In other words, he's pretty much the quintessential jock! If geek-kids want role models, they need to look somewhere very different.

Geeks are hip.

[hey!]

Well, to be a geek you have to really, really, really be into something that most people find pointless, incomprehensible, or dull. To be a geek subculture, you have to be organized around something of that nature.

It follows that while many MBAs may be geeks, the MBA subculture is not a geek subculture. The last time I checked, making money had fairly obvious popular appeal.

"Cool" is in the eye of the beholder. There's another term that entered youth culture through jazz, with roots that go all the way back to Mother Africa. The word "hip" comes from a West African word "hep", mean "one who knows."

To be cool, you have to attract the admiration of others. To be hip you must possess knowledge not available to the public at large. For example, I had a friend who'd walk into a certain restaurant on a Friday night and get immediately seated. Even if they had a line waiting, they'd see him at the back of the line and immediately usher him from to a table. That was sort of cool. But it wasn't hip. His secret was available to anybody: you just had to eat there five times a week.

Now many years ago there used to be a restaurant in my neighborhood that opened at midnight and closed at 6:00am. It catered to an eclectic mix of insomniacs, workers leaving the night shift or going to the graveyard shift, musicians hanging out after their gigs, and vampirish denizens of the night (this was back before anybody had heard of the "goth" subculture).

Being a regular at that place made you hip.

I'd say the very definition of "geek" would be "hip" without being recognizably "cool" to most people. Slinging a mean soldering iron makes you hip to electronics, but cool only to your electronics geek buddies.