Caleb Booker

Why Hype Doesn’t Matter

While I’ve been known to go off on a rant in the past, I’ll restrain myself a little bit this time. Promise. Maybe.

Every week that I do the Business in Virtual Worlds News at least one story comes out deeply concerned about the state of the hype about… something. As if we’re all very concerned about how interested in things reporters and bloggers are.

There’s something you have to remember about full-time reporters though: they aren’t actually doing anything. They’re just talking about people who are. There’s a difference, honest!

Here, this is what I’m talking about:

Farming Hype Is Over

Yes that’s right ladies and gentlemen, it looks like all of that hype over farming (or as the scientists would call it: “agriculture”) is finally over. Around the turn of the century it’s all anyone could talk about. In the decades that followed we were all very concerned about drought and government farming policies. Remember the debates over pesticides and fertilizers?

But think about it: when was the last time the New York Times even carried an article about farming, except to report on the latest livestock disease? Let’s face it, farming is dead. Old news. Just give up on the whole thing.

Hype != Worth

Somehow the logic has been that if nobody is promoting a thing, nobody is finding it useful. To put it another way: everything worth doing is being actively sold to you as a good idea, and always will be. As soon as you are permitted to forget about something, you should because it is no longer useful to anyone anywhere.

Meanwhile, people get tremendous use out of things every day that most people have no idea about. Take this largely ignored CBC report from 1993, for instance:

When this aired nobody really cared, and it certainly wasn’t the beginning of any kind of hype cycle. Heck, it really only covers Usenet newsgroups. It wasn’t until people started hearing about the “world wide web” that the hype really started, quickly followed by reports that the hype had “finally died down”. Meanwhile, the Internet kept growing. Repeat with the “Web 2.0″ catchphrase.

I’m not saying that hype doesn’t have an impact. The dot-com boom was all about people putting too much stock in hype, and the bust about people assuming the negative hype meant something. Still, if you were foolish enough to have lengthy discussions about “the state of hype” over all of this, rather than getting out there and doing something, I guarantee you missed something.

So, what was the last conversation you had about something that was “all hype”? How many things could you have explored, discovered or actually experimented with during that time? What would have been the difference?