I’m a geek, and this isn’t some sort of AA like help group. Part of this is that I like to explore things, especially those that seem odd to other people. In my youth I played a lot of role-playing games (which is a pretty geeky thing to do), with their abundance of statistics, exploration of character (identity..?), heroic or anti-heroic themes and fantastic nature. To anyone under the age of thirty the concept of a group of friends getting together, rolling dice and writing on paper probably seems odd since the community of this particular hobby has been vastly reduced. However, there were some useful things to be learned from it - some mathematical (quickly, what is the probabilty of getting 15+ on three six sided dice?) and some more personal (how would my character respond in this situation?) - and there was a time when it was seen as “a good thing”. One of the main reasons for the hobby, as I knew it, being shunted aside was that, in an effort to gain more market share and compete against the instant gratification of computer games, RPGs were made more ever more simplistic, until the essence was gone. Some things are meant to be difficult.
All the good things require effort to do properly and the essence of geekyness is that learning to do something, practicing it, refining the method is the best bit - the result is kind of irrelevant. The traditional geeky disciplines are perfect examples of this - none more so than programming, but I remember spending hours attempting to squeeze the next 2k base memory and loading device drivers in higher memory for DOS. I didn’t need really need it (except for some games - I seem to recall that Tie Fighter was particularly bad!), but the challenge was in doing it anyway. Geeks don’t just mess with computers though and I don’t see much difference with the car-modding community (how much more BHP can be squeezed from the engine?). We’re all geeks but just express it in different ways. I know music geeks, football geeks, science geeks, book geeks, movie geeks and even alcohol geeks (how much of that wine in the cellar will you actually drink?) where accumulation of knowledge (or collecting examples) becomes more important than the subject itself.
One effect of the rise of Google and Wikipedia is that anyone can become an instant expert (OK, not completely, but people can be convincing). The work of geeks serves to devalue the nature of being a geek, but in some ways that’s the point as well - why shouldn’t everyone be a geek and share the joy? In the same way that one is expected to contribute to the knowledge, one can also take advantage of it. I find it fantastic - those things I’m not already well versed in, I can learn. This would not have been possible in any other era.
There’s a problem though… I keep meeting people who don’t take advantage of this. There are millions of people who have access to this information, but don’t use it and don’t learn from it. People who don’t even get the wrong information that abounds on Wikipedia and don’t even try. They’re not geeks. They’re the same people who don’t have books, never went to libraries. They don’t consume information. I’m not talking about the truely disadvantaged in the third world, or even the poor in the first world. It obviously doesn’t start in schools (although I think our education system discourages the geeky nature) so the fault must lie with parents (for a good look at how parenting translates into success for children, please read The Undercover Economist).
What we can do as geeks (I saw we since according to my access logs I have a reader and it’s not just bots from the search engines!) is take advantage of that. One thing I wanted to do is learn new things, learn about the links between the various disciplines and learn from other people. A blog seems to be a good way of doing just that - constructing one’s thoughts and presenting them to others is a great way of codifying and reinforcing them. I read other people’s work, literary and documentative in both printed and electronic format - both have advantages BTW - and combine those pieces of knowledge to improve my own awareness of things (which in turn improves my professional and personal lives). I’m using LibraryThing to see what other, similar people are reading on paper, but each time my own horizons are expanded the definition of “similar” also expands and the potential for the next expansion is that much greater (as with any network an extra node increases the overall value exponentially). I check the blog-rolls of the blogs I read and get recommendations from friends. My own rss reader has got more categories in now and I’m exposed to a greater variety of subject on a daily basis.
I recently finished The Psychopath’s Bible: For the Extreme Individual and was suprised at the end to discover a list of “courses” including a number of recommended books, on a variety of subjects including logic, socio-economics, history, statistics, business, negotiations and many others. Looking through my recent purchases I noticed a definite overlap (in subject matter, if not necessarily title) to the recommendations in that book! I’m inadvertantly taking the psychopath’s course! Of course, some books have been taken as future purchases…
There’s always been some suspicion of geeks, from the original philosophers, to the natural philosophers and alchemists, to the chemists and physicists who shaped our world. More recently there’s a mysticism and associated suspicion of hackers (including the mis-labelling), who can perform magic with technology beyond the ken of the layman, who will help shape our world in the coming years.
Maybe there’s not that much difference between a geek and a psychopath after all…
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