English | EN The revenge of the geeks
Feb 10, 2014
Working hard all day and being stuck in traffic jams mornings and evenings leaves me with very little time to watch TV. Fortunately enough, we have seen in France a huge development of ADSL based internet access with triple play offerings: internet, telephone and television. At first, this was just real time television, but with time came some additional features such as video on demand, or playing a video that you missed on TV… due to traffic jams. And so did I. In the large choice given, I came across a short video whose title was “The revenge of the geeks”. What a surprising and interesting video!
I must admit that I discovered the term Geek when joining Sogeti. I understood so far that this stood for a person spending almost all his life in front of a computer screen, surfing the internet relentlessly or coding whatever program. Looking at the video, I realized that, conversely to my former understanding, a Geek or Nerd was defined by opposition to a Jock. A good illustration can be found here: http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/relationships/geeks-291842.html. A geek wears glasses, is shy, intelligent, not good at sports and even worse when talking to girls, while a Jock is right the opposite. This is little bit schematic, but that’s the way it is.
The good point of the video though is to show that in fact you have geek and geek: there’s the real geek, and the false one, those who are considered as geek due to their addiction to dungeons and dragons for instance, or comics,… the one who thinks he is a geek because he bought the latest Iphone. Have a look to this:
And you will see that from the initial definition , you have now several if not dozens of sub categories for specific geeks. You have also geeks meetings. It is really refreshing to see a 40/50 year old man with a superman suit on….in such meetings in the video.
Let’s come back to our video. It shows that being rejected by the community, the geeks invested their time in emerging technologies, and seized the computer boom to show to everyone what they were capable of. Have a look to a snapshot of Bill gates in his twenties: the perfect Geek, and now he is the richest man on Earth. And with the rise of the dot com, and the booming internet technologies, it’s true to say that the geeks are really having their revenge.
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