John Hodgman On the Coming Geek Culture

An anonymous reader writes "Famous writer and minor television personality John Hodgman posits the end of the culture of Jockdom in favor of a cultural reverence for engineers, scientists and Slashdot readers: 'Jockdom is very noble. It's not deliberative. It's certainly the best way to win wars. It's the best way to motivate teams of people to fulfill a goal — not just war, but getting things done. The most important way to motivate a factory floor. But as you know, we're not as much of a manufacturing society as we were before. China and other big industrial nations are rewarding their nerds and technicians rather than creating a culture that makes fun of them — it would be wise for us to embrace the book-smart as much as our culture has traditionally embraced the street-smart, the jock-smart. I'm not saying nerds must have their revenge; I'm just saying the time for wedgies is at an end.'"

Comments

Re:Maybe people should be more well-rounded

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That wasn't necessarily RAH, that was one of his characters.
A lot of his characters were kinda fucked up - like the guy who cloned two female versions of himself and had a three-way, or the guy who went back in time and fucked his own mother.

So, I'm just saying, you might want to take what he wrote with a big grain of salt.
After all, specialization is what got our society where it is today - without it we would all still be living the agrarian lifestyle.