« New York's Power Punks | Home | Anchors React to Saddam Capture »
December 12, 2003
We're All Nerds Now. Maybe. +
The Guardian says that due to mainstream interest in super heroes, Lord of the Rings, and high tech, "we're all nerds now." I guess it began a few years ago when low-cost access to the Internet arrived, and suddenly esoteric knowledge gave you a certain cachet among your friends. But as more and more mainstream people get their own websites (via blogging tools, mostly) and get all into LOTR and Spider-Man, do they really become nerds, or do the requirements for being a nerd just change? I think by nature, nerds are those who crave esoteric knowledge about a given subject matter, and who pursue that interest obsessively. So as more people learn who Green Goblin is and what HTTP stands for, nerds are sort of pushed further out to the fringes, or seek it out for themselves. For many, the appeal of being nerdy is that no one else cares about the stuff you're interested in. So as more people become interested, you have to find new fields of interest. While all the neo-nerds eagerly await Spider-Man 2 and X-3, paleo-nerds are wondering when Tony Stark will get his movie. When people finally figure out what HTML stands for, you start talking about RSS. When RSS begins to hit the mainstream, you start talking about Atom and start posting overly detailed attacks on its proposed design. Of course, when the whole world goes crazy for LOTR, you don't really have anywhere else to go, so you just have to tell everybody how you read THE WHOLE TRILOGY when you were in junior high. TWICE!
I'll finish this up later, maybe.
Anyway, the article's traces the rise of the nerd back to Woody Allen, circa 1970, but I think that since the 1980s were so devastating to nerd culture, you have to look at things like the X-Files to understand the recent developments.
And, in case you were wondering, the author visits Forbidden Planet, where he finds someone to parse the difference between a nerd and a geek:
Nerds are highly intelligent but they have no social skills whatsoever. You can't hold a proper conversation with a nerd. Geeks are very intelligent too, but a geek can hold a conversation, and have a girlfriend and an active social life. So I freely admit to being a geek. I have no problem with that label at all.
