Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

It's that time of the year again. Soon it will be the next Geek Dinner and now there's also a Boy Geek Pints event, which is new.

I'm a bit concerned about the use of the word "geek" for this style of events. It appears that more and more of the people who show up to them are "geeks" because they keep a weblog or make funny noises on twitter and fewer and fewer of them are into traditionally geeky things like hacking operating systems or playing with electronics. They also don't have hobbies like mathematics or astronomy, and are unlikely to understand jokes in binary or hex.

Of course I have nothing against these people and I'm sure many of them are very nice and interesting. I also certainly don't mean to imply that geeks of the traditional sort are in any way "better" than the new sort. They're just completely different social groups and overloading the same term for both is a recipe for confusion and disappointment and awkward dinner conversations. You might as well go to a non-geek event and try to strike up a conversation with a random party-goer.

Perhaps it is time for a "Hacker Dinner" for geeks of the traditional sort? Or perhaps the "Philip Conspiracy" (which doesn't exist, of course ;-)) should meet for dinner more often? :-)