On being an anthropological geek…

I’m an anthropological geek. I say this with a healthy dose of self-affacing humor, because it’s pretty much the only claim to geekdom I can make.

What does this mean?

I’m not a web designer.
I’m not a programmer.
I’m not a computer scientist.
Photoshop scares me.
Final Cut scares me more.
I have a three year old digital camera.

In short, I graduated from college with a degree in creative writing and history. I probably have no business writing any of this, really. What I am, I’m afraid, is a person who is positively fascinated by the way technology alters the course of the great ship of destiny. I love technology in a top-down kind of way. This means that I come across words like Ajax and go to the sites that use it. Do I understand the coding? I glean a little over time. But I’m primarily a user.

In short, I pretty much can understand what a thing does, what makes it intrinsically interesting. But I generally have no fucking clue how it does the thing it does. I’m a dilettante. But the more and more I read, the more I think that isn’t really a bad thing. By my own shortcomings, I tend to look more at the big picture because the nuts and bolts might as well be quantum foam to me. I see the forest because it is big and green. I don’t see the trees. I’m blind to the trees. I see a big fucking green spot.