Now I’ll just say it plainly. I am a geek- and I’m proud of it. I’m not ashamed or embarrassed that I get a thrill staying up until 4 in the morning working on figuring out a tough bit of code. I do get a bit of an adrenaline rush when I finally find that omitted semi-colon and have your lines and lines of code magically start working. My brain likes the challenge. Shoot – I like the mental challenge.
Now I know that dictionary.com has a few definitions for the word “geek”:
1. a person who is preoccupied with or very knowledgeable about computing
2. a boring and unattractive social misfit
3. a degenerate
I take a few exceptions to those definitions. First of all, I am incredibly interesting. Yes. Incredibly. I mean, the cats wouldn’t have tilted their heads at me when I talked to them unless I was saying something really worth listening to, right? Right? And come on – unattractive? Just because I’m smart? Please. Appearance is not inversely proportional to IQ. It’s Newton’s 52nd law. Really – look it up. (OK, not really, but that made it more interesting, yes?) And still within that same definition #2, they say I’m a social misfit. I think not. I can maneuver around Twitter and FB with the swish of my mouse. Clearly I’m a social FIT. I’m not even going to touch upon degenerate.
Really, I think that female bloggers have shattered the traditional definitions of “geek”. Women across the globe have taken to their computers, self-taught themselves photo-editing, HTML, CSS, databases, and a plethora of other skills that have traditionally been relegated to geekdom. This generation of geeks are hip, shopping savvy, blogging savvy, kid savvy, and computer savvy bloggers – not frumpy google-eyed, greasy-haired people who hole up in offices all day coding. (Although I’ll admit I might have had a moment like that last week.)
It’s out with the old wine skin definition of geek and in with the new. I guess I’m not sure what the point of all of this was, but I do want to take a moment to salute all of you – my fellow bloggers and readers. It isn’t easy to learn how to code or debug, yet I know that all of you are doing it on some level putting together your blogs. Remember, even copy and pasting Google Analytics code is still CODING. Keep up all the hard work.
Welcome to the Geekdom.
P.S. I humbly submit my new definition of geek.
1. A person who excels at learning about and working with computers;
2. An interesting, amicable, and social media personality who takes to a keyboard to share her bytes of wisdom.
Denise says
March 16, 2011 at 6:09 pmI wish I were the geek you are! BE proud of it. All of my computer skills are self-taught and are limited. I’m older than you and if you saw the computer class I had in high school–you would laugh. It wasn’t mandatory when I was in college.
I’m on Ch. 17 of a novel I started and my formatting is off. My friend told me not to write any more until I reformat the entire 170+ pages. She told me how it’s supposed to be done–she is a published author–but she couldn’t tell me how to do it because she doesn’t have computer skills either (same age). Someone else fixed hers.
My brother is a computer geek, too. He’s not anti-social or a dweeb. He works in homeland security. He plays guitar in a metal band. He’s not WIC, though. And, I can’t ask him to help me fix my novel because it’s a journey of faith and I don’t think he’d understand.
Have a blessed day!
Denise says
March 16, 2011 at 7:02 pmI do have one piece of archaic computer trivia for you. The original term for “binary digit” was bigit. It was rendered useless when “bit” became used in its place. I was taught that term in high school. If you look hard enough, it can be verified. I can prove it for you if necessary. The reason I brought it up, I used it for an answer on a trivia contest today and was told I was wrong and I had to look it up to prove it, but they still wouldn’t give me credit.
Denise says
March 16, 2011 at 7:03 pmI’m sorry, I’m anal about this particular word and people not believing me:
http://computer.yourdictionary.com/bigit