May 18, 2002
Thankfully, my mother is a librarian. The only downside is that I can't just order Mother's Day gifts from Amazon.com. She gets books for free; hell, she decides what books the library should buy. The new Toni Morrison hardcover isn't really going to impress her.
Anyway. I still enjoy reading. It's just easier and more immediate in most cases to entertain myself with TV or computers. And both those pastimes are more active than reading. For me, TV has been interactive since 1984, when our family got our first VCR. You hate making appointments to see the doctor, and that's actually important. Why should you make appointments to watch TV?
I rarely watch live TV, and when I do, I pause frequently, making time for me to skip commercials using my Dishplayer. (I know, TiVo is better, but I was a Dish Network customer first.) The experience is no longer passive-- in some ways, it's like a game. How well can you fast-forward through the ads? I'm just waiting for some hacker to add a scoring mechanism to his TiVo: +10 points for every commercial you skip, -5 if you have to rewind...
No, I'll tell you what they want (what they really, really want). They want to gather marketing information. Nothing survives without advertising. TV networks want to know what you watch so they can use that information to price their commercial rates and/or sell the aggregate data directly to advertisers. You're not a person, you're a data point in the males 18-49 demographic.
Of course, this generally doesn't bother you, because you don't know about it. You're not even a part of it, probably, because of the way Nielsen TV ratings are calculated. I know, statistical sampling is a valid data gathering mechanism, but I just don't trust it in this case. There are too many other variables. I don't know anybody who's part of a "Nielsen family," and I know a lot of people. I'm supposed to trust that my viewing habits are being represented? Yeah, right, and I'll buy that bridge in Manhattan, too.
On the other hand, I'm not sure I want TV networks-- or anyone else-- tracking my viewing habits in microscopic detail. It's good to know that other people, who are in a position to affect whether this happens, also care about privacy rights:
It doesn't matter what you do as a geek, or how much you interact with the geek community, or how many O'Reilly books are in your zoo. It doesn't matter whether you prefer to program in Java, Perl, Python, C++, Visual Basic, or AppleScript. All that matters is that you care enough to know (and remember) what any of it is.
But, as I've also discovered, just being a geek won't get you a job. Geeks come in just as many shapes, sizes, and attitudes as any other ethnic, geographic, or social group. There are geeks I love and geeks I can't stand. Being a geek doesn't automatically mean you're my friend.
And geekiness is only one part of me. I'm also a writer, an artist, a diplomat, a hermit, an enigma, a gadfly. I'm alive. I'm magic.
I'm geek and I'm proud.