The Tragically Unhip

Growing up as a young geek into an adult geek, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed that a lot of things that were once considered uncool or dorky have gradually been absorbed and claimed by the mainstream. Like the internet. In the days of yore, when the internet was still in its fledgeling years and the dot.com bust wasn’t even a glimmer on the digital horizon, we had online services like CompuServe and Prodigy and 14.4 kbit/s modems; those were cutting-edge. Companies never included URLs in their commercials, and most people didn’t even have an e-mail address.

I remember my seventh-grade Technology teacher showing my class a primitive, text-based version of the ‘net. He typed a few words to a Technology teacher in North Carolina: “Hi, this is Mr. H—’s class. How are you guys?” He made eye contact with each and every one of us as we sat erect on our backless stools (“great for posture!”). In the light of the overhead projector, he looked like a mad scientist on the verge of a monumental discovery. And someone—presumably another seventh grade Technology teacher, and not a serial killer—typed back on the screen: “Hello. This is Mrs. E—’s class. The weather here is nice. How is it in New York?” It was as if we had made first contact with extraterrestrial life, albeit of the Raleigh variety.

In the cafeterias, the boys from the computer club were evolving into a separate species at a faster rate than ever before, at least according to popular opinion. They sat, exiled to their own lunch table, and discussed enigmatic text-based role-playing worlds beyond the physical plane that the rest of us inhabited, worlds that could only be accessed from their home computers. By day, they took AP Calculus and aced Honors Chemistry tests. By night, they were half-elven rangers, dwarven barbarians, vampires, dark paladins, and level 5 magic users with other 15-year-olds from around the state, maybe even the country; Dungeons & Dragons had gone online.

Popular opinion was that everyone had (or should have had) better things to do with their precious hours of after-school freedom than sit and type in front of a computer. There were malls to be shopped at, varsity teams to qualify for, garage bands to be formed and disbanded, cigarettes to be smoked, parental liquor cabinets to be discovered, CDs to be listened to, and dark poetry to be written. Who in their right mind, after writing a thesis paper on To Kill A Mocking Bird for ninth-grade English, wanted to spend another three hours at the computer, communing with faceless freaks in parts unknown?

But slowly, almost secretly, I took a few baby steps into the online world myself. I had an AOL account, with a profile that said my gender (female), state (New York), and included my favorite quotation at the time. I had a buddy list of five other friends, one of whom I “blocked” from time to time depending on whether or not I was mad at her. My screen name was Cranberry503, after my favorite band. I developed the beginnings of internet “street smarts”: never giving my password out, and never revealing too much information about myself, like full name or zip code. I learned a new language—LOL, ROTFLMAO—and an entire dictionary of emoticons that stretched from the standard smiley face [:-)] to a buck-toothed vampire smiley [>:-E] to a beach bum frown [8-( ]. I entered political chat rooms, where I made sharp-tongued (or sharp-keyed?) arguments against the destruction of old-growth forests in Oregon and passionate defenses of a Woman’s Right to Choose. Shy in high school, I discovered myself loud and outspoken in this strange online landscape, where the deaf could fully participate in any conversation, and private clubhouse chat rooms could instantly be created. I was part of a new but closeted generation of geekdom; very few girls in my class even admitted to having screen names. I can still recall the proud and daring day when I updated my AOL profile with my first name and felt the thrill of exposing a tidbit of my identity to a largely undiscovered, brave new world. Then movies like Hackers and The Matrix showed us how the computer geeks of the world were going to save us all (while looking amazing in leather), and roles became confused forever.

At least, that’s the way I remember it. Today, if you don’t have at least three miniature electronic devices that let you take pictures, watch videos, look up directions, read movie reviews, or listen to music, you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade. And if your gadget doesn’t do all those things at once, it’s just primitive. The “kids” these days talk to their friends on G-chat while updating their Facebook pages and think nothing of posting photos of themselves that friends can see and strangers can find ways to access. Screen names like “SweetPea0134″ or “Racer5894″ are no longer necessary, as people tend to use their full names now. Adults list their career histories for all to see on LinkedIn. “To google” is a verb. Having a profile on an online social networking site is no longer considered socially repugnant; rather, lacking one marks you as just plain rebellious. And what would a linguist 1,000 years into the future make of our rapidly evolving online language, with its symbols, acronyms and abbreviations? Webster’s even just announced that “overshare“, the act of divulging too much personal information online, was 2008′s Word of the Year.

So what does the computer geek lunch table look like today? Are its patrons still exiled, or are they consulted and venerated? Who are the true geeks now? Have they evolved into higher life forms? Have their once unattractive traits of computer literacy been absorbed and adapted into other cliques? The girls who once regarded the computer dorks as a separate species now argue over comments left on each other’s Facebook walls, send Twitter updates from their mobile phones, and giggle over online videos and web pages. The cute-but-distant musician with the soulful eyes is more likely to woo girls with the playlists on his iPod than with the massive tome of CDs he once kept hidden under his bed. The internet has gained recognition in almost every adolescent demographic as a treasure trove of pornography. And adults, too—parents, professors, bosses—can also be found on Facebook. They have photos of themselves at parties, or with their kids. They send status updates to let people know they’re watching The Colbert Report, or had great vacations in Mexico. The true, pure computer geek still roams free in the lands of elves, but he is no longer limited to text-based worlds; he can now interact with players from around the globe in graphic-rich fantasy worlds.

It’s hard to forget the expression on my Technology teacher’s face all those years ago when a classroom in Raleigh asked us how the weather was in upstate New York. I used to say that all I learned from that class was good posture, but the truth is that I hid my own excitement when we made first contact and our peers in North Carolina responded. (“One giant step for Man…”) The borders of the technology realm were clearly marked “NERD” to try and keep “my kind” (or, what I wanted “my kind” to be) out. Maybe I’m just old and tragically unhip, but these days, the lines that mark us “geek” and “mainstream” have blurred. Yet slowly we began to absorb this world—or this world absorbed us—and closeting my inner geek is a practice I’ve abandoned.