The Rise of The Nerds
Get me the tiny bifocals
I am back in a classroom, behind a desk with a clean and bare notebook page in front of me. But this time, it is not my crippling distraction or laziness that is stopping me from taking notes, but the charming quality of my professors shaking with excitement as they muse about stories, media history, and their engagement with information that has rendered me senseless.
Our processing of information has become rather passive due to the ease at which we can access it. We just know things now and we echo them to each other. Why do we know this, how do we know this and what do we do with this information become secondary thoughts. And thus people who know information because they want to know something or highly passionate people who voluntarily went down the rabbit hole of finding an extremely particular fact have become special. They have become intentional. They have the spotlight because when information is abundant, knowing what you want and being excited about it is rare.
And as life goes, anything that reality starts enjoying has to become the star of our movie industry.
It was himbos a while back so Chris Evans entered the scene with American Pie. Murderers and rugged criminals have been entering our movie scene off and on with Mads Mikkelsen, Christian Bale and Penn Badgley. But now with the onset of the beautiful nerds, we have an entire month proving our point.
But this isn’t a new thing because this has been happening in waves too.
The slutty little glasses keep regaining their charm.
What happened in these time periods? Significant new passions started arising like 1995 people seemed to gravitate towards people who were obsessed with technology or sci-fi and fantasy shows on the small screen — including The X-Files, Sliders, Babylon 5, Xena: Warrior Princess, and The Outer Limits and Star Trek. And it was comparatively difficult to watch and read and enjoy these hobbies because either it was too expensive or too inaccessible so the nerds had the patience and obsession to commit to the work.
2010s was a great time to love superheroes and when your superheroes are also hot nerds who sit in a fancy science lab and occasionally hulk out, then wouldn’t it signal the rise of the nerds. Even Black Widow liked her men a little awkward and smart. On top of that, nerds didn’t have to be the odd one out anymore because social media started rising and people with all sorts of interests could “hang out.”
Coming back to now, we have the office siren aesthetic, slutty little glasses accessory, off duty literature professor outfit and many such physical displays of the rise of nerd in mainstream media. Is it employability? Is it the economy? Is it just the commitment? Is it that they still enjoy what they do?
People’s engagement with information and hobbies is dire. We have too much of one and barely any of the other. “Nerds” are now becoming the rare breed of people who have a lot of information and opinions about their hobbies. Be it Superman’s Clark Kent who takes his break from superhero duties by writing pressing articles about the sorry state of his city.
If someone has a passionate interest in any specific thing then they can be interested and excited by just doing that and not needing some third space or external stimulant to get them all motivated. In this economy, having nerdy interests that do not financially drain your pockets is a blessing. Or having nerdy enough passions can get you employed.
Even just enjoying a movie on one of the many OTT platforms can be cheaper than stepping out into a city centre to meet friends for coffee. Also, in such an ever connected world, we are all living in a similar bubble so if there is this person who promises secrets from a world beyond then sir, I am parched.