No offence intended to anyone in particular. I guess I’m just feeling a little wearied by hype.
Hype would have to be one of the greatest drivers of nothing in particular since the invention of Trivial Pursuit. We have hype to thank for 3G mobiles, the Internet in general and the Strokes. Not that any of these things are bad in themselves. But it’s the hype machine that really pisses me off. Due to the existence of this shadowy, pneumatic thingy, a certain group of people get very, very excited about something, and may actually find some use for it, or get some pleasure out of it. Following this, everyone else finds out about it because it’s, like, cool. Immediately, some of these people (ie, a proportion of everybody else) start slagging it off, because of the fact that only a few people have found a use for it.
Following on from this round of hype and counter-hype, some of the people who were originally into this thing (whatever) realise that it’s all phoney, ditch the hyped thing and find something else to get hyped up about (thus setting in train another piece of hype). Meanwhile the hypsters continue scouring the masses of people who aren’t into anything in particular in the hope of hyping the living daylights out of something even more obscure and hype-worthy than the Strokes, Googlewhacking or Tamagochies. Basically there is no room left in life for anything anyone’s heard, seen, felt, touched, experienced or thought before. And why? Because these things lack hype.
All that being said, the award for best hype would have to go to the pundits and crystal-ball gazers of the IT world, whose dogged utterance of phrases such as “… and applications or platforms that haven’t even been invented or thought of yet …” makes me cry with laughter.
Keep it up, guys. We can’t wait for whatever it is you think of hyping up next.
