Hype in New Media
Hype in new media (in the more general media sense of the term "hype") plays a large part in the adoption of new media forms by society. Applying the idea of the hype cycle to new media technologies such as the iPod, which was found to have failure rates of 13.7% in a 2005 MacInTouch study in the middle of the iPod boom, we can see the same trends may apply for forms of new media as they apply to technology in general.
Terry Flew states that hype (generally the enthusiastic and strong feeling around new forms of media and technology in which we expect they will modify everything for the better) surrounding new media technologies and their popularisation, along with the development of the Internet, is a common characteristic. But following shortly after the period of 'inflated expectations', as per the diagram above, the new media technologies quickly fall into a period of disenchantment, which is the end of the primary, and strongest, phase of hype.
Many analyses of the Internet in the 1990s featured large amounts of hype, which as a result created "debunking" responses toward the Internet. However, such hype and the negative and positive responses toward it have now given way to research that looks empirically at new media and its impact.
Read more about this topic: Hype Cycle
Famous quotes containing the words hype and/or media:
“Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescent hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)