I'm a geek. I readily admit it, hell I use it to define myself to people when they first meet me. I was never one of the "cool kids" yet I regularly find they are "into" what interested me years earlier. Below are some examples.
Computers: This one is fairly obvious at first glance, but look again. In the early 80's while the cool kids were tie-dying their clothing, and meeting at the roller-rinks us geeks either were convincing our parents to get us a computer, or were teaching ourselves how to use the computers our parents had reluctantly let us use because they had gotten it for themselves for work and they thought maybe someday we might possibly get some value out of the things. While I never taught myself more than basic programming I can troubleshoot a computer, you can point to any component and I can tell you the proper name, what it does, and what the specs of a current generation of that component are. A few years after us geeks were handing in neatly typed papers for school our classmates started getting in on the act and getting computers, mostly for gaming but reluctantly for school work as well.
The Internet: So now everyone, geek and cool kid, had a computer, but us geeks went to the next level, we connected our computers together and were communicating back and forth. The cool kids started making fun of us again, talking about us sitting in our basement lairs talking about Star Trek and getting tanned by monitor radiation. Now the internet is everywhere. Cool hang-outs would be barren if they didn't offer free wifi access, you can't go 30 steps in a store without one of the cool kids with a cellphone out, not to their ear, but to their thumbs checking their facebook status.
Blogs: Ok I was late to this party, I admit. But the geek collective used blogs to spread news that traditional media ignored either because they didn't find interesting or didn't want out (Bill Clinton's affair with Monica was first reported on the Drudge Report, a for stories that were refused by the AP.) Then the cool kids started blogging about everything from what they had for supper to who they slept with that night. Not really the point, again we were there first.
It's not just technology either, look at the last few summers big blockbuster movies, all comic-book movies (Spiderman, X-Men, Hellboy, etc) hell even Star Wars was ours first and has been embraced by the cool kids.
My point is that even though the cool kids ridicule us, tease us, beat us up, they need us. They all follow each other meaning no one finds fresh new things, the geeks are the trail blazers, willing to take the risks find the awsome new technology, figure out how it will benefit the herd and return it to them. I wonder if Lewis and Clark were ever given a wedgie?
