At school, I thought I was a geek. Back in mid-1980’s Warwickshire, this was seen as a Bad Thing; nearly the Baddest Thing it could pos­sibly be.
To be a geek was to be like Screech, or George McFly (pre-Biff smack­down, obvi­ously). But today that seems to have com­pletely changed.

The defin­i­tion of ‘geek’ is a hazy one. There are all kinds of sub genres; the nerds, the spods and the dweebs are just a small sample. However, they are united by a few key factors — allow me to present the four C’s of Geek.

1. Clothes

   Generally it’s not your nor­mal dress sense. No jeans and t-shirt for these fine chaps. Elaborate full length coats, crumpled suits and battered ties were just some of the cos­tumery they wore. This is not to imply that geeks have a sense of fash­ion. There is no such thing as a fash­ion­able geek — their clothes are either bought by their mum, or are straight out of a fancy dress shop.

2. Comics

   Of course, all geeks read com­ics. Well known fact, innit? Be it the main­stream Marvel/DC stuff or a crummy self pub­lished one by someone with an entre­pren­eur­ial streak and access to a pho­to­copier. All geeks have a comic some­where about their per­son. It’s their secur­ity blanket.

3. Computers

   Unnaturally good at this stuff — whether they can get to grips with a new game/ bit of soft­ware in an incred­ibly short amount of time, or if they can hap­pily re-code Windows so that it doesn’t suck quite so hard, they really under­stand this sort of thing. Something in their psy­cho­logy lends itself to work­ing with glow­ing boxes for hours at a time. Oh, and they HATE Windows. Without ques­tion. It doesn’t mat­ter how good that OS may get in the future, there are just some battles that it will always lose.

4. Cinema

   Films are a geek’s lifeblood. Science Fiction primar­ily, but gen­er­ally most kinds of Indie film mak­ing will always draw the geeks in. If a flm meets with approval, they will, by vari­ous meth­ods, absorb as much trivia and facts about that film. They will flock to inter­views, magazine art­icles, web­casts and such to find out as much as pos­sible, just in case that film becomes the filmic Mecca — “Cult”. To have seen a film when if first came out, and to know all about it by the time it has achieved massive DVD sales is the geek equi­val­ent of hav­ing seen the latest multi-award win­ning band in a small back street pub before they were signed. They ‘were there’ at the beginning.

But the all-encompassing, one defin­ing factor that sep­ar­ated a geek from the Others is that they were always the minor­ity. Always. That was the point. If there were loads of them, they’d be Cool. Quad Erat Demon-wossname, innit?

And this is what con­fuses me a little these days; ‘Geek Chic’ is a phrase ban­died around since Jarvis Cocker first minced around singing about Common People in the nineties.

Doctor Who — an icon if ever there was one for geeks the world over — has regen­er­ated him­self into one of the most pop­u­lar British TV series for the last few years, David Tennant as the Doctor, flash­ing his oh-so-bright teeth around the place is even a sex sym­bol. Amongst the cur­rent top ten highest gross­ing films ever there fea­tures a boy wiz­ard, a Jedi, a load of Hobbits and myth­ical kings and an ogre.

It’s now get­ting hard to find a comic that isn’t either already a suc­cess­ful film fran­chise, or has been snapped up by a pro­duc­tion com­pany and is just about the make the move onto screen.

And as for com­puters. Well. The Internet is chock full of them — for­ums, mail­ing lists and blogs chock-full of people spout­ing vit­riol about the minu­tiae of web-design (hi there), books, films and tv pro­grammes. The com­puter games industry is rap­idly approach­ing the same epic pro­por­tions as the indus­tries of cars, film-making and drug deal­ing, and who made com­puter games so pop­u­lar? Hell, who made the com­puter games?

I like being a geek. And des­pite what I may have learned at school, it seems that a LOT of other people do too. Could it be pos­sible that we now the major­ity? In which case, were there people hid­ing their geek-like tend­en­cies at school, or is it some­thing that comes later in life for some folk? You know, like wis­dom teeth.

Oh, and there’s another ‘C’ I just thought of

Contrariness

Don’t try to pin geeks down in a list that loosely defines them. They hate that. Almost cer­tainly right now there are a few of you lot think­ing “Actually, I think Windows is rather good”.

You colossal geek.