Excerpt: Geek Culture

One night a few years ago, media writer Jon Katz opened an e-mail message sent by a newly graduated high schooler from the town of Middleton, Idaho. Katz, a regular Rolling Stone contributor, had for some time been thinking and writing about what he called "geek" culture in America. People who love computers and the Internet share a deep sense of alienation, he had found, a feeling that they don't belong anywhere but in front of a computer screen.

The e-mail that Katz read that night was from Jesse Dailey, a bright Internet junkie who, along with his best friend, Eric Twilegar, was plotting to leave small-town life for a technology job in the big city. Katz would eventually help the two boys in their quest and write a book about them, the newly released Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho. But that first e-mail made him hop a plane for Idaho to learn more about what Dailey said had first given him a sense of belonging: the Middleton High Geek Club and its founder, a teacher named Mr. Brown.

My first day in Idaho, it struck me how strangely traditional and American their story was, and how simultaneously unprecedented: Two unattached, semidestitute kids were planning to head cross-country, to leave their dreary lives behind and make their fortunes in a strange, huge, vastly more complex place than...