Geek Smug and the Social Revolution

by Tom Mattey - Graphics & Website Administrator, Echo Research Ltd

As a self confessed ‘geek’ I have always collected gadgets and kept up with the latest developments in the tech world. I’ve seen the internet when it was a small network mainly used by universities for file sharing.

Along with many other followers and workers in the IT industry, I watched the boom in the 90’s with some smug amusement, as non ‘tech-savvy’ people started extolling the virtues of the internet using terms that they did not understand, the hype surrounding it seemed disproportionate for people who had already seen the potential and already used it regularly. This smugness was increased when the infamous ‘dot-com bubble’ finally burst in the late 90’s.

The huge hype seemed to have passed but then a very curious shift occurred.

Social Networking took off in the US, closely followed by the UK, computers dropped in price, even humble mobile phones started to use email and connect to the internet, suddenly my friends and work colleagues weren’t coming to me anymore to ask me help them connect their camera to their PC, they where emailing me to show me their photos on Flickr and Facebook.

It was all very deflating as the one thing I had known more about than most people had almost been taken away overnight; suddenly everyone was good at computing, everyone had the latest PDA or phone with web capabilities; the smugness was gone.

At first I resisted the lure of Facebook, very haughtily proclaiming that “I didn’t care what my old school friends I no longer spoke to had for dinner yesterday.” But, eventually I was persuaded by a friend moving to another country to try it and within days was I hooked, conducting half of my communications via the site. It was becoming clearer to me just how powerful a communications tool the whole concept was. Twitter soon followed and this time I wasn’t haughty, I had learnt my lesson from my embarrassing Facebook u-turn.

Now let’s be honest, we are all doing it. There are a few stragglers who are resisting, with exception of a militant few, but they won’t hold out much longer. I firmly believe that in the next few years this will have had more of an impact in the way we communicate than the mobile phone going mainstream. I can say that happily now, admit my earlier scepticism was not borne out of a genuine reason to dislike social networking, but out of frustration at no longer being much better than everyone else when it came to technology.

That realised, I’m sold.

The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.