6. They are deep wells of insight
What makes up a geek is basically a combination of enthusiasm, dedication, and strong hunger for knowledge and mastery of a specific set of topics that might not necessarily interest most people. They’re the kind of people who don’t need school teachers and parents pushing them to study something just to get it over with. They’re gonna study and work on stuff hard until they become wizards and experts.
And this capacity tends to spill over into other parts of life. They tend to approach everything as a sort of project to master. And the result are insights you might not expect from most people, or non-geeks, insights that may sometimes really change your perspective.
Photo by Jacob Bøtter.
Guest
|
2PartsAnalog
I never thought that we would be cool. The world s changing!
Murray Snudge
Just because geeks are extremely useful does not make them cool – case not proved.
Karl
IT has such a conceit that they are THE tech and nerds. Sorry. There were tech nerds when punch cards were developed for looms. I am Technical Support for my company. The face that I am an Oracle DBA, programmer, and computer power user has nothing to do with the fact that my company makes high purity chemicals and that is what I am supporting. And it’s a whole lot easier to teach computers to a chemist than chemistry to a computer nerd.
Based on the history I know, the generation born in the late 80’s and 90’s is so isolated that, despite the “liberating” force of the internet, they are re-inventing everything around them. Comicon? There have been fan-run science fiction conventions since the ’40s, possibly earlier. Search for WorldCon. Cosplay? Those were hall costumes, part of the masquerade. Chemists and materials science nerds made the basic building blocks of that silicon you use as the foundation of your chips. Sorry, but you can’t claim the exclusive title of nerds.
SEAbeliever
The article isn’t saying that people are claiming to have started all of this. It is stating that the IT crowd has created the necessary spark to ignite the enormous popularity of the “tech and nerds”. It has all been said or done before, regardless of whether or not we are aware of it.