Geekness is an attitude, a value system, an expression of outsiderness. For many of us, it's also the fuzzy point where technology, politics, and popular culture come together.
The idea of geekness is controversial, confusing. For years, it has meant a freak or worse, something ungainly, outside the tent, something strange.
Increasingly, and especially on the Web, the term geek has come to mean something else, something neat, assertive, and increasingly positive. To me, it captures one of the lodestone spirits visible on many parts of the Web: The experience of the brainy, idiosyncratic, out-of-sync outsider who suddenly finds himself or herself on the inside, communicating and messaging, debating and inventing, explaining and understanding the machinery that everybody else needs.
For geeks, pop culture is a password, an ID, religion, politics, entertainment, and common language all rolled up in one experience. And most of it – cable TV, network broadcasting, videos, computer communications, movies – glares from one sort of screen or another.
In fact, geeks are participating in the control of much of our popular culture. They created the animation and effects that made Titanic work. They have their own TV show, The X-Files. They invent, promote, own, and use the machinery of the Web and the Net. They can sometimes relate to the disconnected struggle of Ally McBeal, though not nearly as much as they identify with Dana Scully. They went to see Gattaca and Contact, Wag the Dog and *Independence Day,*and Lost in Space and Godzilla. They can't wait for The Truman Show, from all preliminary indications, a pure Geek drama.
On Monday mornings, geeks are never jawing about politics. They're comparing notes on the movies they saw over the weekend, and they're very likely nowhere near a water cooler while doing so.
This column was initially dubbed "Media Rant" and was meant to focus on the convergence of media, politics, and the Web during the 1996 presidential campaign. Like its author, it has evolved, for better or worse.
Its name has changed (now, simply, "Jon Katz on Media"), and its definition of media has broadened to include TV, movies, the varied ways that politics, technology, and culture collide – as in the Monica Lewinsky drama. In recent months, I've also added my 2 cents on pop culture, offerings of particular interest to geeks.
It's no longer possible to separate culture from traditional notions of media, politics, and technology. More and more, they are the same, a point the producers of Wag the Dog were trying hard to make. On HotWired, we've believed this for a long time. When we talk to one another, it's more apt to be about Scully or Cartman than The New York Times, Sidney Blumenthal, Bill Clinton, or Slate.
This column's evolution, much noticed, has proved mildly controversial. Although I've written as a critic for nearly a decade, some readers have complained that I should stick to media and other "serious" issues. Most simply jump in to agree or disagree that the special effects in Titanic were awesome, that futuristic movies are unfailingly gloomy, or that the most interesting thing about Seinfeld was its intrinsic Jewishness.
So the column, like the medium in which it appears, evolves again. Mostly, it will still mull over media, politics, technology, and the anthropology of the Web. But when Godzilla or The X-Files hits the screen, or some bizarre new show pops up on cable, we'll be there, with reviews and commentary – otherwise known as "Geek Screens."
Send feedback to Jon Katz.
Related columns:
Charting the ascension of the geek.
More and more, geeks control the media.
The rise and fall of Geek Force.
Dogmatic Contact fails as a geek flick.
Readers respond to the geek ascension.
Is The X-Files dying a long, boring death?
Catch freedom fever, go see Boogie Nights.
This article originally appeared in HotWired.
