A comment, a one-liner, I recently received to a very old blog post, read as follows:  “you suck you gay computer nerd why dont you go die.”  Even though WordPress let this through the spam filter, my usual censoring policy kicked in, and I deleted it.  That policy is this: if a comment doesn’t add to the conversation, whether it’s positive or negative, there is a—pfft!—and it’s terminated with prejudice, like via a Glock 19 with silencer.  Nevertheless, this particular comment started me thinking about how computers and the internet have allowed introverts like me to have a voice.  It’s a small voice, but it reverberates more via internet TCP/IP packets than it would ever do in personal face-to-face discussions.

While “you suck” might be appropriate (however, some people do like my writing), I reluctantly inform this reader/commenter that 1) I am not gay, although I’m a supporter of human rights, and those include gay rights; 2) I am not a computer nerd (more on this later); and 3) I don’t have any plans to die soon, but that’s mostly out of my control—and his too, I hope.  The title of the post this person read was “Short stories versus novels…” from October 20, 2010.  I reread this post.  Besides its obvious length (a recurring failure of mine, compared to others’ posts), I fail to see what our writer of negative tweets found so objectionable.  Take a look and comment if you see something I don’t.  (I recently had an eye exam, but I could have missed something.)

Writers are often introverts.  The movie As Good as It Gets had the extroverted actor Jack Nicholson play the role of a stereotypical introverted writer, for example.  Whether a writer goes beyond introvert to OCD and misanthropic behavior as in Nicholson’s portrayal (a bit over the top, but he won an Oscar for the role, as did Helen Hunt, the other protagonist), we often lose ourselves in our reading and writing at the expense of human interaction.  The computer and the internet, though, allow people like me (it’s possible that type A personalities are still required) to reach out and have e-conversations with our fellow men, women and children (I write YA novels too) that make Nicholson’s character less of a stereotype in the modern writing world (especially considering the need for marketing if you’re an indie author).

Does this mean that today’s indie writers must become computer nerds?  Not by my definition.  Sure, you might need to know a few applications like Word, WordPress, Powerpoint, and Adobe Reader as tools, and others like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn for social networking, but that’s not enough to qualify as computer nerd.  Among computer nerds, I count seriously e-addicted gamers, benign or malevolent hackers, builders of apps and other software, scientific programmers, and all the true IT people necessary to keep a modern corporation from falling on its e-face in this web world.  Once, as a scientist, maybe I could be counted in the class of scientific programmers (I spoke Basic, Matlab, FORTRAN, and C++, with emphasis on the past tense), but I would never have classified myself as a computer nerd.

I don’t waste my time with computer games (although I wrote about a sophisticated role-playing game in the YA novel The Secret Lab and can very well imagine one of my thriller books being turned into a fast-action computer game—and then a movie, hopefully).  The only thing I ever hacked was adding Cordic algorithms for computing trig functions in machine language to my Radio Shack Color Computer to use in my Basic programs.  I would never want to be in the business of writing marketable apps and other software in today’s computer environment, infinitely more complicated than the one corresponding to that little Color Computer and its now primitive CPU.  I also have a healthy respect for true IT people—they’re the ones that go beyond installing new software for the barely computer illiterate to actually figuring out my problems (which I often cause—before, by pushing the limits; now, by ignorance).

The one-word “nerd” label I’ll accept, but not as Dr. Seuss intended.  In high school, I became a member of the “nerd herd”—it probably saved my life, since my boyhood neighbor and best friend became a gang member, alcoholic, and drug-addicted, divorced and unloved man, dead by the time he was thirty.  My nerdy friends and I weren’t just Sheldon and friends at the beginning of The Big Bang Theory either (the nerdy gals were added later in the TV show while they were in our group from the very beginning)—there were some very smart and cute girls in my group, which created various fringe benefits, from when we sought out those racy classics like Tom Jones, Catcher in the Rye and Fanny Hill, to when we competed to become President of the Astronomy Club (use your imagination—this is a “clean site”).  By the time I reached college, “nerd” had lost much of its negative meaning!

I consider the internet to be a positive development for introverts and extroverts alike.  In fact, the internet has become that planetary playground where these two very different galactic species can meet and have an intelligent conversation.  What happened in the case of my one-liner friend is fortunately the exception…and sad.  I don’t think he could make me become gay or run off to an euthanasia clinic that Ms. Palin said the liberals run, but it might have been interesting to hear his real thoughts.  Same goes for all of you out there.  Comments that pass WordPress’ and my spam filters are always welcome, even if you have a contrary opinion.  Join the conversation.

And so it goes….

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2012 at 4:00 am and is filed under Technology, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.