Last night I experienced the thrill of meeting one of the world's most famous geeks, the owner/founder of a very well known and extremely successful dotcom. Although "thrill" is probably not the most accurate word to describe what turned out to be a completely unassuming, laid-back and drama-free introduction (unlike that of, say, a certain domestic diva I met a few years ago who shall remain nameless but who scared the bejeezus out of me.) He wore khaki's with his shirt tucked in and a really old saggy belt. He had Dilbert cartoons and Star Wars toys scattered around his office and over the door was a sign with the Star Trek logo that read "Bridge."
My husband was ecstatic when I told him this. The new popular crowd are his People.
The internet has redefined popularity. Popularity no longer has as much to do with looks and fashion as with the clever manipulation of technology and the ability to purchase and figure out a video camera. It is the Time of the Geeks where people like Bill Gates, who was probably dunked in the toilet by bullies when he was a kid, are considered the most popular and desirable.
I have never been popular. In high school, a time I refer to as The Darkness, I was a goth wannabee, only because I couldn't figure out what other group to fit into. I was naturally dark-haired, and naturally depressed, so goth seemed like the best option. I wasn't smart enough to hang with the academic decathalon crowd whose jokes all whizzed over my head as if spoken in Latin (actually some of them probably WERE spoken in Latin). I certainly wasn't pretty enough, perky enough, or blonde enough to be in the then-popular group populated by cheerleaders and prom queens. And I didn't have the bad fashion sense or heinous taste in music to join the cowboy group. So I settled for sort of a lower-tier goth but I didn't do terribly well there either because the idea was only to PRETEND to be melodramatic and depressed, not to actually BE depressed which was, well, depressing.
But times have changed.
Now popularity is defined not by how many friends you have, what kind of car you drive, how big your house is, how many boys like you, how you hold your liquor, or how many IRAs you have.
No, today's popular crowd is defined by one thing and one thing only: google hits.
There is no bigger loser than someone who comes up with NO HITS when you google them. Pathetic! The person I met last night has thousands of google hits and in many different languages. That, my friend, is one popular guy. And he looks and acts like what would have been defined back in high school as a dork.
So now the challenge is not to get a nicer car or figure out how to get the head cheerleader to date you. Now the challenge is to make your mark all over cyberspace so anyone who googles you will think you are a total dork and therefore not a loser. How's that for irony?
I got my first google hit by accident. I was writing for The Valley Planet at the time and they posted the paper online. I didn't really understand the true value of this until later; at the time I was more excited by the old-fashioned thrill of seeing my name in print, rather than on a screen. It wasn't until I discovered an obsession with googling that I started to consider my own somewhat pitiful content presence.
When the Valley Planet changed hands and became more of a gardening rag than the off-beat, left-wing publication it used to be, I left and started this website. But that wasn't enough. One website wouldn't make me popular. That would be like having only one pair of Guess jeans in 1986. It shows you care enough to get one pair but you're not cool enough to have more than that. (Yeah, guess who only had one pair of Guess jeans...?)
My sister-in-law introduced me to the wonders of myspace. I was able to regurgitate all my most useless thoughts and wacky photographs onto that page for the world, should they be so inclined to search for me, to see. I joined online recruiting tools and linked up with friends who wrote for online forums. And all the while I continued to google myself, a pasttime which has become akin to masturbating - everybody does it, but nobody admits it.
I've only recently stepped back from my vainglorious attempts to finally, at this late stage in life, join the popular group, when I discovered the downside to spreading your content for strangers (and, yes, I did mean that to come across as slightly vulgar): cyber-stalking.
Not just other people stalking me, but me stalking other people. It's addictive in a destructive way but, more importantly, it just points out what we already knew: I will never be popular. Because those popular girls managed to affect a complete disinterest in the number of people who admired them, while at the same time being perfectly aware of who did and did not. If they are the ballerinas of social interraction, I am the tasmanian devil. The trick that I have not mastered is to be an attention whore without anybody KNOWING you're an attention whore.
But here it is folks: I am a total attention whore. I can hide it no longer. Not that I ever did a very good job of hiding it to begin with.
In the meantime, I have sneakily managed to obtain one more google hit with this story about google hits. Now I just need to get my hands on some Star Trek memoribilia and I'm in. It's just a matter of time before I make Internet Prom Queen. I can feel it.
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