In the same sense that Saddam won the first Gulf War.
Also, please be advised that an addiction is a physical process, and to equate it to, say, posting on a message board or playing golf, really does belittle the victims of addiction, and to a large degree, blames them unfairly.
That said, I was browsing at the bookstore, where I thumbed through The House of Intellect, and I came across an interesting discourse on what a conversation actually is. Barzun made the point that a conversation is the sifting of opinion, and he was very specific in that phrasing. His claim was that what passes for conversation is, at best, an exchange of opinion, whereby one speaker allows the other to give her opinion while she waits to inject her own, giving no real regard to what the other has said. In contrast, a real conversation is the process of sifting opinion with logic, argument, rhetoric, examples, analogies, and so on, so that the opinions held are changed from the originals, modified and honed and matured.
I found Barzun’s take on conversation to be quite enlightening, and he really did reflect what I perceive to be a significant difference between two modes of communication. Conversations are fun and enjoyable; “conversations” are annoying and boring. What’s nice about the SDMB is that it’s a place where one can actually engage in real, bona fide conversations.
I’m not sure how it is that the medium defines the extent to which one is a so-called geek. People have conversed by the written word for a very long time, and yet doing it electronically suddenly makes one a geek. That is a strange way of looking at it.
Posters at the SDMB have helped me greatly with my job and they have been gracious hosts when I travelled abroad. Absent the SDMB, I wouldn’t have competed in NaNoWriMo twice—and won both times—and I wouldn’t currently be writing another novel. And I can engage in conversation with people in a manner that would be quite difficult in the so-called real world. Like it or not, not a lot of people have the sorts of mindsets that make them entertaining to talk with.
I’m sure the OP will take this post to be some sort of confirmation of his theory, whatever incarnation it may happen to be in when this is read; the premature and misplaced claims of victory make that abundantly clear. That said, I can’t help but wonder aloud, so to speak, what is going on in that person’s head, and what could that person possibly think the SDMB is for? It’s almost as though the rant is motivated by the realization that the OP is not the smartest person in the room, and rather than taking the opportunity to learn, he has chosen to prove a point by stating the obvious, as though one could validly draw an ought from an is. Yes, people post here. And if posting on a message board qualifies one as a geek, then it trivially follows that SDMB posters are geeks. That’s not insightful; that’s just an obvious conclusion from an ad hoc definition.
I always thought being a skillful maven of technology was what made one a geek, and yet I had to post a question because I had trouble inserting special characters into my documents. If I’m a geek, then I’m doing a terrible job of it.