[Air-L] nerd culture and new media

[Alex Halavais]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Peter Timusk <ptimusk at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> So Nerds have to do free software eh? I do not buy the open source craze. It
> is like Lessig saying hackers did it for security reasons. Two many
> generalizations.

I'm not sure I buy the closed source craze, and half suspect it may be
a fad :). There is good reason for nerdiness to be tied to the free
software movement, and there are ties back to academia, as well. And,
of course, to hacking.

I suppose there could be a nerdy narrative that avoids much of the
development of computing and open exchange of ideas, that skips the
1970s and Unix and Spacewar. This narrative would hold the progenitors
of nerd culture, and the ideal nerds to be people like Bill Gates,
Steve Jobs, and maybe Mitch Kapor. But I think that narrative would be
pretty hard to sell to those who self-identify as nerds.

I think that it's fare to claim that part of the shared value system
of geek/nerds is the open sharing of ideas. That's one of the claims
Himanen makes in the Hacker Ethic, not to mention Nelson's Computer
Lib. That dedication to openness is not unproblematical, but I think
if you asked most people who self-identified as nerds or geeks, they
would be users of or fans of open source and free software. The
reasons need not be political: if you like working with technology,
you enjoy the ability to take things apart and put them together
again--to hack. While that is theoretically possible with everything,
from Legos to atoms, from Linux to Vista, it's easier with Legos and
Linux.

Is it a generalization? Of course. Do all self-described nerds use
open source software tools exclusively? Highly unlikely. Nonetheless,
the ideals embodied by these tools seem to match the ideals espoused
by most nerds--openness, sharing, decentralization--and so I would
expect there to be a certain affinity there.

- Alex

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