The Digital Age

Picture if you will, a nerd, as strange request as it seems. You will probably imagine someone with frizzy hair, a knitted sweater-vest, and huge glasses, someone who sits in their parents basement playing text based adventure games and polishing their enormous collection of star wars figurines. Perhaps twenty years ago, but today, you’d be wrong.

The nature of the nerd is changing, bizarre though it may be. The synonymous Glee Clubs and A/V Clubs and Chess Teams reduced almost to the point of fiction, seen more in popular seventies styled television shows than in the real world, particularly with new shows such as the titular, bizarre, and almost sickeningly joyful “Glee”.

So what then, is the modern day nerd? What defines, encompasses him, in the same way that that all too familiar diet of Dungeons & Dragons and scrolling monochrome lines of code did for previous generations. Simply put, in this day and age, what is a nerd?

Cool. Yes, you read that right, the modern nerd is COOL. Think about it, with technology and communication advancing in wholly new and totally unpredicted ways; the hottest music in the world is created almost entirely electronically, the most popular and profitable entertainment medium by a country mile is the video game, socializing is as much a part of cyberspace as it is a part of the real world. You sit reading this on the internet, not in a magazine or newspaper. You contact and arrange meetings with friends on Facebook and Twitter, not by phone or text. Everywhere you go and everything you do, you are interacting with computers in ways never before imagined. You are living in a world of science-fiction.

We had the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and for far too long the strong have bested and outranked the intelligent.

The year is 2011. Welcome to the digital age. Here, the nerd is king.

Peter Moorhead
Peter Moorheadhttps://www.capsulecomputers.com.au
Journalist, Blogger, Artist, Gamer.