Patton Oswalt just wrote a great little article for Wired called, Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die. It’s a very entertaining read about what use to make up geeks and how the nerdy culture has changed. Here’s a sample of the piece…
“The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait, month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. Hell, there were a few weeks during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether Nirvana or Tad would be the next band to break big. Imagine the terror!”
He talks a lot about how things had more time to gestate within your own head before the internet. You had to reread, re-listen, re-watch, things over and over again just to feed your nerdy appetite. Oswalt fear is that with all the information being readily available these days, is that it is creating weaker geeks.
Again, it’s a very entertaining article. He also goes into the fear of future creative laziness. “Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?” His solution for the geek culture is pretty hysterical. It’s sure to make any child of the 80s smile and feel like an old person sitting on their front porch saying “Kids these days…” while shaking their fist in the air.
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