In Revenge of the Nerds last week I wrote that tech media (albeit online tech media) suddenly seems to be hot again.
So I was amused to see David Brooks NY Times Op Ed on Friday, titled Alpha Geeks.
David Brooks, as you may well know, is a pundit, author, journalist and astute chronicler of sociological trends (he wrote Bobos in Paradise). In the column, he talks about the rise of the geek, including the derivation of the word “nerd,” the difference between geeks and and nerds, and everything else you wanted to know about the topic (and then some).
I include an excerpt below:
The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls — Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and so on.
Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.
They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated. In “The Laws of Cool,” Alan Liu writes: “Cool is a feeling for information.” When someone has that dexterity, you know it.
Given the shifts happening in the media world, rise of social and online media, and the growing importance of technology in PR, perhaps now is good time for us PR folk (and not just tech PR types) to find our inner geeks.
