Rob on Geeks… and Little Blue Men

The past twenty-four hours have made me really regret the society in which we find ourselves. Sure, we live in an age when the vastness of human knowledge (and misinformation) is more accessible than ever. Our intellectual predecessors would have hacked limbs from their bodies using poorly sharpened machetes for 10 minutes of access to Google or Wikipedia. Our human potential for progress and inventiveness is greater than any time in our previous history. We have more free time, more resources and more access to information than ever before. If Newton stood on the shoulders of giants then modern man rests easy in the clouds.

Unfortunately, that resting easy is exactly the problem. Recently I sallied forth once again into the realm of podcast blather to find something new to balm my wearied mind on my increasingly frequent commutes between Indianapolis and Lafayette. In the past I’ve had great luck with the simple but strong offerings from Car Talk and The Moth Podcast. Failing those Stuff You Should Know always promised some nugget of amusement though presented in a manner slightly less erudite than I would ultimately prefer. Trying to get back to my roots I chose Growing Up Geek for my previous two trips and to be utterly honest I’m still waiting for the hosts to actually grow up, as the title of their contribution insists they’ve already done. To say the content is banal is to give it far too much credit. These three gentlemen blather on for hours about the latest video game or software and somehow make it even less informative than the ubiquitous Kim Komando.

I realize that someone must take the misty nuances of software and technology to the masses. For this I give Kim credit. She plods on week after week handing out her tidbits of advice to those who only resist the impulse to rest a cup in their open CD trays with the utmost of concentration. As inane as I may find most of what she says, she addresses her target audience with respect and does them a great service. The Growing Up Geek podcast, in contrast, manages to degrade my opinion of ‘geeks’ in general. Are geeks really people who sit around voraciously consuming video games at $50 a pop, mindless agents of consumerism for electronic gadgets but in the end contributing little more to society then the carbon emissions caused by their trips back and forth to Best Buy?

The state of Geekdom really saddens me because these are people with single-minded and delightful focus. They sit, rapt, attentive, staring at a screen for hours. They’re not unintelligent. They have keen and supple minds that could be unraveling the secrets of the universe but instead they’ve become addicted to this opiate of video stimuli. Rather than contributing to society they’ve become side-tracked into this endless loop. They’re constantly solving and re-solving the same contrived problem over and over again. How do I save Zelda? How can I finally beat Mario Kart? These examples are wildly inaccurate but they stand none the less. These geeks spend hours untying the intellectual knots woven by other people, software and game designers, thousands of miles away. I want to shout at the speakers, “What the FUCK is the point! Put your mind to work solving something real! Create something! DO FUCKING SOMETHING ORIGINAL!” Why hash and rehash the same worn path that a thousand, a million people before you have trodden? Why solve a puzzle that has been solved before? These are the thoughts that nag me, like a million little dwarves with hammers striking my toes, when I succumb to the green-glowing eye of the xBox. It dizzies me to think how much might be contributed to the wealth of human knowledge if all the accumulated brainpower were put to better use.

Now having spent my polemic for the day, let me move on to the festivities of last night. Wednesday night found me back in a very familiar place, the much familiar walkways of Purdue University, my albino matron. As I walked along with Laura I could not help but think back to the nearly innumerable years that I spent there. In some ways I think that Laura’s geographic location is a sign of the rightness of our relationship. While at least somewhat inconvenient, the fact that I find myself increasingly back at the University that formed most of my intellectual background is very comforting. Each step brings back at flood of memories from more formative times.

Last night was no exception. Sitting stage-right in the Elliot Hall of Music I was reminded of the time I was coerced onto the stage with Penn and Teller during their visit to Purdue. In retrospect I’m surprised my head did not explode into a million embarrassed fragments. This evening, however, the guests of honor were not magicians but musicians. Blue Man Group paid a visit to West Lafayette and while I am not traditionally a man who is easily impressed I most certainly was in this case. Of course the evening had its lulls but the crescendo of the evening complete with strobes, huge balloons bouncing through the audience and other various astounding visual effects is one that will live with me indefinitely. I wish only that I’d had sufficient deceitfulness to sneak my camera into the event. Sadly the image of that day shall have to live solely in my memory for all times; Flickr will have to take my word for it.

The group’s message, however, was not merely visual. They sought to educate as well as entertain and their statements about technology seemed most apropos given my podcast experience on the way up to Lafayette. The brief recap of their statements are the ones we’ve heard a million times before but all keenly and determinedly ignored. As a society we ignore our kids, we don’t read enough and we’re just too fucking distracted. We’re so constantly connected to every source of information in the universe from text messages to twitter that we multi-task ourselves into doing a shitty job of digesting any of it. Even as I sit here writing this, my phone makes a noise to tell me that some jerkwad friend of a friend on Facebook has posted a futon for sale. Why the fuck would I want a futon? Yet Facebook sees fit to email me about it. Tomorrow I’m going to go to work and have a specific agenda in mind. There are vastly important things to do. If I’m not careful, however, I’ll get sucked into some email-induced hell. Someone will need something and I’ll spend the whole damn day doing it. Just because I didn’t focus sufficiently to do the important thing I was supposed to do that will create some even greater emergency later because of the shitty job I did on the previous thing. It’s a never-ending loop of distraction and half-assedness and it’s now becoming the new norm in American life.

In most things in my life I try to be a throwback. I feel dirty watching new movies. I hate reading books any less than 100 years old (unless they’re at least British). If I find a word is obsolete I make a point to use it as often as possible just to confuse people. I think it’s time to do the same with my own over-connected life. It’s time to turn off the cell phone and close the email. Let’s ignore the multitude of inputs and just do the important shit for a while. Find out what happened at school today. Finish that book you started reading far too long ago. Hell, watch a TV show and not check your email while it’s on. That’s a start. When you’ve practiced all that, sit down and have a conversation. Long-time readers of this blog will be unsurprised to hear me suggest that. For many years I’ve been an advocate of the one-on-one conversation. It’s about time that as Americans we sat down and really made the time for each other. We all have so much to say if only someone would bother to sit down with us and listen to us say it.

I’m listening. Are you?