BOOK
Take some well-worn Net-culture rants, a bushel of regurgitated columns about techno-teen alienation, scads of email musings, and a reporting trip to Idaho. The result is Jon Katz's Geeks.
Katz comes to the project as both a veteran print and electronic journalist (CBS Morning News, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone) and an observer of the digital frontier - lately with hardcore nerd site slashdot.org, earlier as a columnist for Wired and HotWired.
The reporter in Katz shows as soon as he meets Idaho teens Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar, at which point the story turns from vague rhapsodizing on geekdom into a chronicle of two tech-savvy boys who used to be the unhappiest kids at Middleton High School. Katz helps them escape from the dusty, down-at-the-heels Famous Potatoes State, and discovers in Jesse the son he always wanted. Triumph follows: Jesse and Eric get tech-support jobs in Chicago, though Jesse, whose real home is the Internet, initially rents an apartment 30 miles south of the Loop (where's MapQuest when you need it?). Then, with a big assist from Katz, Jesse manages to talk his way into the University of Chicago class of 2003. Jesse repays the favor, in a way: The most honest, absorbing writing in the book comes from a poem and letter Jesse wrote as part of the admissions process.
Geeks works as a coming-of-age tale, but as the story of the nerd vanguard, it relies on too many old generalizations and too few specific details. Katz defines geeks so broadly - you liked The Matrix, you don't like taking orders, you didn't go to the prom, or if you did, you were miserable - that just about anyone can get into the club.
Of course, Katz is partly right: In the information society, there's a little bit of geek in everyone. But there's a useful distinction to be drawn between those of us who tweak consumer-friendly tech toys and those who revel in diving beneath the surface to divine the imaginative impulse at the heart of a device or a line of code. A portrait of the latter has been drawn in fiction (Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, for one), and the type has been demonstrated in biography and nonfiction, from James Watson's The Double Helix to Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.
One turns the last page of Geeks convinced that Katz is laudably genuine and generous in his quest to help Jesse but unpersuaded that he has discovered the importance of being geek. That tale - perhaps lurking in a computer science lab in Berkeley or Bangalore, or maybe secreted in Jesse's own future at the University of Chicago - remains to be told.
Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho, by Jon Katz: $22.95. Villard Books: (800) 793 2665, +1 (212) 751 2600, www.randomhouse.com.
STREET CRED
The Short Goodbye
Par2-D2
Violent Laughter
The March of Progress
Flighty Mouse
Fast Outta the Gate
Broadband Gamespot
Read Me
Music
Goth Talk
Dark Passage
Got Skim?
Weather Vane on a Chain
just outta beta
Lenscraft
The Road to Nerdville
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