The Geek Delusion

Facebook has changed these days. It’s no longer a place where you only saw your friends express themselves in ways you never imagined them to or a place where you dealt with people you only came across physically. It has become this behemoth of a source for equally distributed useful and useless information. In a nutshell, if we bemoaned the lack of information both personal and not-so-personal cat going nuts kind-of-thing ten years ago, we should notice a considerable change in how the e-media, or rather fb, has been able to change just that. If you somehow haven’t done so, then you should be probably reading this blog in some cave in congo trying to outwit some killer gorillas that smash the skull into thousand pieces. Yes, just finished the reading Congo. Great read btw. 

What facebook has to offer nowadays is quite fascinating to be honest. The spectrum of what goes on that wall is huge thanks to an equally large spectrum of people’s interest that embeds in them. As I scan through the mess one after the other like a scavenger looking inside a garbage for a fresh meal, I do come across pretty interesting blogs, writings, poems and news but then you have to go through things like these:

Gotta love this guy. Too bad he has to watch the movie again.

I don’t really see the point in making noise, wailing, shouting and loud drum beating about geek pride. I get that people want to dissociate themselves from the commoners, be unique and expressive in their own ways so much so that they feel so insecure about their own abilities that they feel the need to associate themselves to some group of so called “geeks” to say “hey dude! i am geekier than you ok? You need to know that.. I am serious, not joking here. You got that tape? Yeah you better do.” 

I did digging into what the word actually meant in the first place. Wiki says:

The word geek is a slang term originally used to describe eccentric or non-mainstream people; in current use, the word typically connotes an expert or enthusiast or a person obsessed with a hobby or intellectual pursuit, with a general pejorative meaning of a "peculiar or otherwise dis-likable person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual".

I am beginning to sense that people who categorize themselves as geeks have some serious issues. 

A friend of mine summed it up quite nicely:

Rather than being proud of their own individual self and being unique, they have to get their self-esteem from being part of another group. Can’t stand geek or nerd. 

Well, that brings us to the word nerd.

I like the way she puts a hash tag at the end and adds a lingering “though.” Personally, I find the writer of the script above to be very smart and quick but then she goes on to write stuff like these that makes me feel if maybe I need to be appreciative of her talents a little more. If being nerd is cool, I guess, then eating hamburgers while doing upside down yoga is pretty cool too. 

Enough said.