Items related to Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho
Now in paperback comes the eye-opening, endearing, true tale hailed by the Chicago Sun-Times as a sweet story about two teens who escape dead-end lives in Caldwell, Idaho . . . and why society badly needs to reconnect with its geeks. Includes a new Afterword.
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Review:
Geek: A member of the new cultural elite, a pop culture-loving, techno-centered Community of Social Discontents. Most geeks rose above a suffocatingly u imaginative educational system, where they were surrounded by obnoxious social values and hostile peers, to build the freest and most inventive culture on the planet: the Internet and World Wide Web. Now running the systems that run the world.
Tendency toward braininess and individuality, traits that often trigger resentment, isolation, or exclusion. Identifiable by a singular obsessiveness about the things they love, both work and play, and a well-honed sense of bitter, even savage, outsider humor. Universally suspicious of authority. In this era, the geek Ascension, a positive, even envied term. Definitions involving chicken heads no longer apply.
--Jon Katz
Teenage hackers Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar are the heroes of Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho, a thoughtful, affecting pop ethnography--and heroes is exactly what Jon Katz wants you to see them as. To the rest of the world, themselves included, they are geeks, which is a complicated thing to be these days. With the rise of the networked economy, the world and its wealth have become increasingly dependent on the expertise of Star Wars-loving, cola-swilling propellerheads everywhere. Yet at the same time, the typical geek--especially the typical adolescent geek--remains a consummate outsider, with passions for technological arcana that are both alienating and empowering.
From the Back Cover:
Katz, a writer for both Rolling Stone and the profoundly geeky Web site Slashdot.org, does a fine job of mapping this ambiguous new state of affairs (the Geek Ascendancy, he calls it). But the book's heart and soul is the well-told tale of Jesse and Eric's adventurous flight from lonely, dead-end lives in Idaho Mormon country to brighter possibilities in Chicago.
Katz argues that this great escape couldn't have happened without the networks (both social and technological) that are the lifeblood of '90s geekdom, but he doesn't let his celebratory argument get in the way of the story. Although he's a tireless advocate for geeks (the last chapters retrace his impassioned advocacy for brooding teenage weirdos in the face of post-Columbine media attacks), he presents their culture warts and all, with its tendencies toward social awkwardness and arrogance recognizably intact. He doesn't demand your sympathy for his heroes and their world--but he wins it anyway, by bringing them vividly and honestly to life. --Julian Dibbell
Geek: A member of the new cultural elite, a pop culture-loving, techno-centered Community of Social Discontents. Most geeks rose above a suffocatingly u imaginative educational system, where they were surrounded by obnoxious social values and hostile peers, to build the freest and most inventive culture on the planet: the Internet and World Wide Web. Now running the systems that run the world.
Tendency toward braininess and individuality, traits that often trigger resentment, isolation, or exclusion. Identifiable by a singular obsessiveness about the things they love, both work and play, and a well-honed sense of bitter, even savage, outsider humor. Universally suspicious of authority. In this era, the geek Ascension, a positive, even envied term. Definitions involving chicken heads no longer apply.
--Jon Katz
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherPerfection Learning
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0756904889
- ISBN 13 9780756904883
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages208
- Rating
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