Lovely labels

Perhaps it is part of being human: the need to label and classify anything and everything, including ourselves. Perhaps it dates back to our tribal origins, the need to belong to a group or die a horrible, painful death at the hands of enemies or predators. If you don't fit in with some kind of community, you're as good as dead. Likewise, if you can't classify every person around you, how can you possibly know who it's safe to hang out with without getting mauled?

If the device is an augmentation to my brain, so too is the meaning of the device an augmentation to my social status. No wonder so many kids want BlackBerrys.

Tallulah Habib, social media activist, ITWeb

That's the only reasonable explanation I can think of for our insistence on classification. That and linguistic convenience. It's easier, after all, to use one word to describe someone than a few pages. Take, for instance, the word “hipster”, which seems to have come to prominence recently. With a single word you can so succinctly describe a person who wears hats and plaid, uses the phrase “before it was cool” in a non-ironic way, and spends a lot of time in coffee shops looking contemplative.

Of course this kind of shorthand only really works if all parties agree on a definition. Recently, the good old debate about what constitutes a “geek” has reared its head again, for instance. Sparked by a column posted by 'Forbes Magazine' on its Web site last week, entitled: “Dear fake geek girls: please go away”, girls who had the audacity to call themselves geeks immediately jumped into defensive positions.

“If being a geek is just about competing to see who can be the most obsessed and unpleasant, f*** it, I'm not that,” says Sexy Videogameland blogger Leigh Alexander.

“I hate the idea of the 'fake geek girl'. And I hate it the most because it is so pervasive and subtle I personally find it very difficult to keep it out of my interactions with other geeks... who are you to say that a stranger, someone you're never likely to meet, is not genuinely interested in the thing they appear to be interested in? Who are you? I just... what? I'm rendered incoherent,” says Susana Polo, of TheMarySue.com.

See, this is the problem with labels. Is a geek someone who's into tech? Or pop culture? Are there different kinds of geeks? Different levels? Is it a compliment or an insult?

Labels are as complicated as they are convenient. As the old linguistics example goes, if I say “dog” you probably see a very different image from the one I have in my head (a Border Collie, for the record). So, what happens if I say I've just signed a contract for an iPhone?

A mobile phone is a very personal device - research conducted a few years ago showed that people were more likely to hand over their car keys than their cellphones. If there's one technology that we consider a part of who we are as people, it's the mobile. Some would even go as far as to say they've literally become a part of us, an augmentation, an external brain (we even sleep with them). Which is why I was hesitant to sign on that particular dotted line. I liked the iPhone specs, I know other people in my profession profess the deepest affection for their iDevices, and I was curious to see if it lived up to the hype.

Unfortunately, I still felt like I was giving in, going over to the dark side. A conversation with a group of local businesspeople at a Deloitte function last year crossed my mind. At a table of eight, I was the only one without an Apple of some kind. This made me at best slow on the uptake, at worst deeply inferior. I realised then that getting an iPhone or iPad wasn't only about what the device could do, it was also about what it stood for - as these gentlemen seemed to believe - there was no possible way you could work in tech media without one and still be taken seriously.

Perhaps this has changed now that HTC and Samsung have made Android cool. Nevertheless, iPhone still has a lot of meaning attached to it - evidenced by the range of strong reactions I get whenever I mention mine. If the device is an augmentation to my brain, so too is the meaning of the device an augmentation to my social status. No wonder so many kids want BlackBerrys.

While all humans are guilty of this kind of classification, I think those of us in tech are particularly bad. I'm probably going to prove this point by using a few sweeping generalisations myself in the next few paragraphs, but bear with me.

I think it's because we're still at the stage of the so-called information revolution where those working in tech were making use of technology like the Internet and “social networking” (though it wasn't initially called that) long before the masses. Many of us were referred to as “geeks” or “nerds” in a completely non-complimentary way. It was our thing, our escape. I'm young, but even I remember when IRC and Linux message boards were the secret societies you joined on Friday nights when the cool kids were out doing whatever it was that popular kids did. Now the popular kids have arrived online, have flooded the IM streams and are even coding apps. To put it bluntly: it's a threat to the tribe that made us feel special. Which is why articles like the Forbes' one gets written, telling the posers to GTFO. It's why so many early tweeters lament the social network's rising popularity, and why the announcement that Facebook has bought Instagram has been met with despair. Because the normal people have arrived; it's gone mainstream.

What made us a geek or a nerd back in the day, now makes us the average human being. It's a hard pill to swallow, and so instead we look for other classifications or communities to belong to. The mobiles we own, the platforms we use, the operating systems we prefer are not really important in their own right. Not any more. What is important, though, still in this day and age, is the sense of belonging that comes with it.

For, if our own little communities dissolve into nothingness, with the onslaught of the average, who will make us feel different, who will give us a sense of camaraderie? Most importantly, who will protect us from the lions?

I still need to see if there's an app for that.