A Geek Groundswell
Author: Laura Preble

One day when I had nothing to do (well, actually, I had a lot
to do, but I didn't want to do any of it), I decided to play the
Google game. This is the one where you input your own name or
something else into the field in quotes to see how many search
results you get. Because my most recent book, Queen Geeks in
Love, was coming out soon, I decided to search the term "geek."
What I found astounded me.

I got more nearly 70 million hits from the word "geek."

That's million.

So, I figured that most every term would fetch that many
results, or close to it. I started with what I would assume is
the antithesis of 'geek': the "gossip girl', which yielded
3,560,000. 'Beauty Queen" yielded 1,750.000. Glamour came the
closest to geek, with 44,600,000, but as you can plainly see,
being glamorous is nothing compared to being geeky,
statistically. Even the trendy "fashionista" only turned back
5,590,000 results.

So what does this mean? Is Google a valid measurement of
popular culture? I suppose it's not extremely scientific, but it
does seem to be in indication of how many sites mention the
word, which, by the way, originated as a circus term for a
person who bit the heads off live animals. Thankfully, that
particular aspect of geekdom seems to have faded out, unless you
count Ozzy Osbourne in his former glory days.

If you look to the true measure of what's out there in the
zeitgeist, check your local television listings. This fall,
every new show seems to be supernatural (which is within the
realm of the geek.) We have Moonlight, a vampire tale. We have
Journeyman, Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, and Medium. The
biggies—Lost and Heroes—sell DVD collections in droves. Geeks
are no longer hiding in their cyberclosets.

As early as 2001, the term "geek chic" began to be used, and in
fact, a London clothing company ran a campaign using that very
term to market its clothing. Fast forward to last year, when ABC
premiered a show called Ugly Betty, with America Ferrera
starring as an anti-fashion uber-geek. Well, guess who was on
the October 2007 cover of Glamour Magazine? That's right. The
geeky girl. Of course, they glammed her up, but still, I
couldn't help but feel that someone from my team finally made it
to the big leagues.

Gloria Baume, a fan of Ugly Betty and a fashion editor at Teen
Vogue, told the New York Times that Betty's "geek-chic look
could trickle down." In the New York Times article, she added,
''I'm obsessed with the nerd look right now,'' adding that a
number of designers appear to be similarly taken with all things
dorky. ''Paul Smith did it in London,'' she said. ''Lacoste did
it here in New York. Luella also did the geek look. In her own
kind of funny, twisted way, Betty has her own sense of style.
It's kooky, but it's totally her.'' (New York Times, October
2006).

USA Today even noted that "Knowledge is power and geek is chic.
If you're a cyber whiz who is plugged into the pop-culture world
of sci-fi, fantasy, comic books and cult horror, maybe even the
master of a Web shrine devoted to such once-arcane matters, you
don't just rule. You rock."

Scholars are even on the geek bandwagon. One Danish scholar
wrote a dissertation on geek culture and cited it as "the third
counterculture" after hippies and yuppies. "The geek culture is
changing the norm, transforming mainstream culture," writes Lars
Konzack in his thesis, titled "Geek culture, the third
counterculture" " Not long ago nobody would have known outside
the geek culture what was meant by player character, experience
points, level gain, and hit points. Now it seems like everybody
knows. The geek culture is transforming mainstream cultures and
it's just the beginning of a general cultural change in that
direction," Lars Konzack, Aalborg University, Denmark.

In my own novels, Queen Geek Social Club and Queen Geeks in
Love, the self-professed geeks of the title are girls who
unapologetically are themselves. They like science and science
fiction, but they also like fashion and guys. They want to
change the world, but they also want to enjoy it. I like to
think of them as the geek I never was in high school—confident,
comfortable, clever. They know who they are, and although they
struggle with self-doubt and anxiety like all teenagers, they
use their intelligence and the support of their geek sisters to
get through it all. In the end, it's a great message to send to
girls (or guys), and it reminds me of something someone once
wrote in the margin of my yearbook: "be the way you are and
you'll go far." Go geeks.


About The Author: Laura Preble is a journalist, singer,
teacher, and writer from San Diego. Her first Queen Geek novel
is The Queen Geek Social Club, followed up this fall with Queen
Geeks in Love. Learn more at http://www.queengeeksocialclub.com