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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Sean Clarke

Are you a technosexual?

First things first: I'm not one. But I am intrigued by the idea of the "technosexual"; defined by the excellent Wordspy as "A male with a strong aesthetic sense and a love of technology".

How is it different from geek? Look again at that "strong aesthetic sense". Real geeks never care what their technology looks like; it's almost a badge of honour to have an ugly box running some elegant code. What fascinated me more than the term itself was the linguistic process of transmission. The word's been knocking around on sites like AlterNet for over six months, but hasn't, that I can see, made much impact on the mainstream British media.

I bumped into it on the website of the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia, where it's joined by the related term "technomacho" - we have a few of them in this office. The Spanish innovation seems to me the more interesting term; technosexual sounds like a Mac user, but technomacho has a thrillingly dangerous edge of alpha geek to it. How I wish I were one.

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