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Ethanol-fueled writes:

The New York Times reports (use Google search or browser extensions to bypass the paywall):

Never before has the boundary between geek culture and mainstream culture been so porous. Beyond xkcd's popularity and the national obsession with Apple products, other examples abound. Whether it is TV series like "The Big Bang Theory" and "Silicon Valley," or comic-book movies such as this year’s top-grossing title, "Guardians of the Galaxy," or the runner-up, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," or fantasy-based fiction like the "Game of Thrones" books (and HBO show), once-fringe, nerd-friendly obsessions like gadgets, comic books and fire-breathing dragons are increasingly everyone’s obsessions.

"Becoming mainstream is the wrong word; the mainstream is catching up,” said the actor Wil Wheaton, a self-described champion of nerd culture who wrote a memoir, "Just a Geek," and appeared in "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

An engineering degree is also no longer a requisite to using technology, as seemingly anyone today can install a printer or upload a video. Similarly, another signifier of nerd status — knowing obscure facts about favorite subjects — has also lost its currency. The total number of “Simpsons” characters or the name of a constellation is only a Wikipedia entry away.

Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) said it was healthy that the tech culture had seeped into the larger culture, and warned against the community turning inward with a "nerd pride or 'revenge of the nerds' attitude." In an email he expanded further: "This can easily become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that can make a community steadily more homogeneous and exclusionary." Mr. Munroe said he thought this was a reason that "geek culture" has had such persistent problems with sexism, and that the tech industry’s gender and racial diversity is so woeful.

Katari Sporrong, a self-described "Art Nerd, not a Tech Nerd", from Queens, was in the back of a crowd at en event waiting for Mr. Munroe to speak. Ms. Sporrong said, "It's a little bit demeaning, real nerd and fake nerd," adding that "everyone lives with tech; right now I have three devices — my phone, my Kindle, my iPod." Looking at the techie crowd in a "not cynical way," she saw a "common intelligence" around her:

"The world maybe isn’t getting smarter," she said. "But it is trying to."

Submitter's Note: I was a nerd before it was cool to be one.