So what is the difference between a nerd and a geek?
Nerd is a term widely used to describe the sometimes socially awkward, technologically minded, gifted people who built the digital communication structures.
Geeks are less interested and skilled in the mechanics of technology. They are more outward, political, and preoccupied with the applications of machinery and technology. If the nerd patched together the wires and software that creates an online community, the geek is the one setting its agenda, arguing about how it’s used, and obsessed with its social applications.
Both nerds and geeks have generally experienced outsiderness or worse in one form or another – socially, and often in the context of schools and work. The dictionaries are filled with derisive terms for brainy, individualistic, and independent people.
To me, there is now a profound difference between nerds and geeks, especially as the online world evolves culturally, politically, and economically.
Bill Gates, for example, is perhaps the most successful nerd who ever lived, although, increasingly, he gives nerds a bad name. A genius at crafting and marketing software, he is physiologically unable to utter a coherent sentence about how new technology will impact the country and the world, despite the fact that it’s almost impossible to pick up a magazine without encountering a breathless interview about how he got to be so wonderful and how far he can see.
In fairness, most nerds are not as corporate as Gates, nor as aggressive or wealthy.
Geeks are the architects and conceptualizers of the intricately linked, intensely graphic, and community-centered Web. They have developed and advanced the idea of linked information. They celebrate the culture of interactivity, which relentlessly breaks down the barriers between the sellers and consumers of media. They bristle with attitude.
One geek suggested yet another criteria for geekdom: “Anybody you know who is worth knowing suffered as a kid from being smart, interesting, or different. Test it out.” It sure worked for me.
If the Internet started out a nerd culture, the Web became a geek one, despite the fact that the two groups coexist online in great numbers.
Together, these groups deserve credit not only for the Net’s existence, but for the powerful political strains that revolve around certain parts of the emerging digital culture:
The landmark idea that digital technology can be used to create countless new communities, regardless of geography or time
The radical idea that media isn’t about large corporations and blow-dried Washington talk-show pundits (talk about freaks), but about individual people communicating freely with one another all over the ether
The belief that information should be free to all, and that technology should be cheap and accessible
The resistance to political or corporate domination of this new technology
The creation of an information mode in which many people are talking to many people, rather than one in which a few journalists or politicians control all the talking
Can someone be online who is neither a geek or a nerd? Of course. Are they inferior to geeks or nerds? No. Gasbags can write all the columns they want, but an elemental geek tenet is that individuals get the right to define themselves. And geeks insist upon exercising it. They have the right to pick their own labels and define their own culture, and they’ll do it, no matter what anybody says about them.
Nerds and geeks share an allergic sensitivity to the elitism they grew up watching in journalism and politics. They are wary of names and terms that suggest they are a superior group of people, something almost everyone on both sides feels Wired magazine has repeatedly been guilty of.
“I have to say the criteria you spelled out as defining geeks fit me pretty well, but I object to the idea that I’m part of some hip new culture,” messaged Diana.
It’s an admirable response, and there were many like it. But verbally rejecting elitism doesn’t make the issue vanish for Diana or anybody else. One of the political dilemmas facing the geeks, as it confronted the nerds before them, is that they are in profound danger of becoming an entrenched elitist culture, as well as a politically powerful one, whether they want to or not.
Throughout human history, education, technology, and communications have often been the cornerstone ingredients of political power and empire. Geeks and netizens, especially younger ones, possess all three in stunning numbers. They are smart, comparatively affluent, and have an unprecedented ability to speak with one another. They have access to much of the information available in the world, and they are freer than almost anyone else in American culture to express themselves as they wish – to deny God, talk about sex, criticize authority, reject dogma.
Does this make them elitist? Not by design. But contemporary politicians like Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Al Gore cynically invoke techno-jabberwocky about bridges to the future while doing virtually nothing of any substance to close the gap between those who use new technology for education, research, community, and commerce and those who can’t. The techno-gap between the affluent and the poor does nothing but widen.
Increasingly, as the lack of access to digital technology impacts this group educationally, socially, and economically, it will become a volatile political issue. Educators have already begun reporting shocking differences in the research capabilities of wired vs. nonwired students. Several studies have already reported that people with computers at their schools are between six and ten times more likely to get good jobs right out of high school and college than those who didn’t have them. Political struggles like the one over the Communications Decency Act also demonstrated the newfound power of geeks to communicate with one another and take political action on a common issue.
What has this to do with geekdom?
A lot.
“What I like about being a geek,” emailed Jerry from San Antonio, “is that I’ve discovered that on the Web, I’m not an outsider. It’s okay to be smart. It’s okay to be passionate and enthusiastic about movies and culture. It’s okay to be a geek, for the first time in my life. I love it. And we are a political community, because we can reach each other so easily. But I don’t know what our political issues will be, beyond censorship.”
Jerry’s message is important.
Like it or not, the geeks will have to deal with the fact that the politics of technology, as well as censorship, will be one of their most significant political issues well into the millennium.
The bottom line? Online, there is the sense that this is a new time. That geeks are at the heart of it, their long and difficult history being rewritten, thanks to a remarkable new technology with implications that only seem to deepen and spread.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
