Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

Am I a geek or a nerd? Where do I stand in the modern society? How do other people think about me being a geek or a nerd? Answers can be found in this New York Times article by David Brooks. Central to his article is the idea that an explosion of social web technology has given geeks an opportunity to be cool and smart, and today geeks are often enjoying a higher social status than the jocks, preps, frat boys and sorority sisters.

What’s difference between “nerds” and “geeks”?

At first, a nerd was a geek with better grades. The word described a high-school or college outcast who was persecuted by the jocks, preps, frat boys and sorority sisters.

A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.

Why geeks are cool and socialable?

But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds.

They [Geeks] can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated. In “The Laws of Cool,” Alan Liu writes: “Cool is a feeling for information.” When someone has that dexterity, you know it.

Video games existed since the 1980’s, but little has changed in the way we play them. With the launching of Nintendo Wii, this is all about to change. This is not a Wii technology review but my thoughts on Wii’s innovative technology and how it may change the way we play and perceive video games. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m fluent in two different languages, Chinese and English. Tim Finin’s recent blog post on “China predicted to have 60,000,000 bloggers by year’s end” got me to think about the benefits of being bilingual (or multi-lingual) on the Internet.

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Frank Ahrens at Washington Post asks the question, “Why do you blog?” He received many interesting responds. One blogger expresses that blogging is the only way for him/her to make friends. Some other believes that blogging is engaged democracy — creating an end-run around power publication, in that the people with the most power control what is heard.

Of course, not everyone thinks blogging is a such great invention. One person replied, “28.7 million blogs translates to almost 28.7 million illiterate fools with a digital soapbox who cannot manage to correctly spell the word ‘definitely,’ even with the help of a spellchecker.”

I asked myself, “Why do I blog?”

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