The glorious 25 May is once again upon us, towels are being folded correctly and thousands of voices are suddenly crying out in pain as they discover another little tweak to a certain film that was first released 35 years ago today. If that isn't enough for you to celebrate, today is also once again Geek Pride Day. Last year IT recruitment agency Modis commissioned a survey of 1,000 Americans on their opinions around the term geek, and they've run it again this year to see how things have changed.
Looking through the results it seems that Geeks are becoming even more acceptable than last year, with 54% of respondents rating Geeks as "extremely intelligent" (up from 45% last year). 71% reckon we're the people to go for technology advice (up from 56%), and more than half of Americans (51%) define Geeks as professionally successful - a huge leap from the 31% in last year's survey. Around two-thirds of respondents defined a "Geek" as someone who is addicted to technology and who spends more time online than offline, yet when given a list of items and asked which they would have trouble living without, 71% of the "Geeks" put a pen and paper above technology and gadgets such as a computer (58%), smartphone (41%), or MP3 player (25 %). The non-geeks listed their cars as the thing they couldn't live without!
The results show that our addiction to our smartphones is still increasing with 45% of "Geeks" admitting to using their phones whilst driving - but it's not clear if this is simply for sat-nav or musical reasons, or whether Angry Birds on the go is really taking off. (Note: please don't be amongst this number - it's a really silly, and illegal, thing to do). Slightly less worrying is using them in other inappropriate places such and weddings, funerals, on a date or, in 3% of respondents' cases, at a job interview! Bet that went down well.
One result I find surprising is that 60% of "Geeks" would find it more stressful to lose the data from their hard drives than to go through a relationship breakup. All I can say to that is that the pool of respondents couldn't have contained too many GeekDads and GeekMoms because; a) we would definitely miss our other halves more than a bit of data, and b) we'd have all that data backed up securely. In several different locations.
Modis is also running a little "GeekStakes" competition in conjunction with our friends at ThinkGeek over on their Facebook page until June 1st, where you can win some more gadgets to distract you from doing the thing that you're supposed to be doing right now!
