Scott Rosenberg

It's nearly impossible to open a magazine, visit a bookstore, or watch TV today without being bombarded with the powerful, mysterious promise of digital technology -- a kind of technological hucksterism that has come to be called cyberhype. The defining traits of cyberhype include promises of vast transformations of daily life wrought by new digital gadgets; aggressive, hortatory use of the future tense; glossy visions of social perfection achieved via technological means; and a reliance on trendy but vague language that conveys more attitude than information (such as the prefix "cyber" itself).

To be sure, every realm of American life harbors its own form of hype. But in the world of digital technology and the Internet, cyberhype has achieved a unique combination of intensity, ubiquity, and persistence. It doesn't matter that the landscape is littered with the empty husks of last year's empty promises (500 channels of interactive TV in every living room! virtual-reality playrooms in every basement!). Every year brings new offerings: the "highway" of Bill Gates' The Road Ahead, with its information-laden pipes pumping enlightenment into every home and classroom; the sensor-driven "ubiquitous computing" blueprints emerging from Nicholas Negroponte's MIT Media Lab; the digital nirvana promised by George Gilder in books like Life After Television.¹ Three years ago, Time Warner's "Full Service Network" was to usher us all into interactive-television heaven; today, it's push technology that will change the world. Or the "network computer." Or next year's edition of Microsoft Windows. Industry leaders, pundits, and scholars keep selling us pictures of new techno-utopias, and we keep buying into them.

But where does the cycle of cyberhype start: With the companies whose financial future depends on our embrace of their innovations? With the media that whip up our expectations for new technologies long before we've had a chance to get our hands on them? At the think tanks and universities to which the media turn for visionary pronouncements on forthcoming breakthroughs? Or in our own minds, shaped by an American tradition of technological millennialism and hungry for the fulfillment of our machine dreams?

The technology industry is surely a primary culprit. Long-time industry observer and now New York Times columnist Denise Caruso, writing recently in the Columbia Journalism Review, blamed the "awesome hype machine of the technology industry" for spurring on the news media's reckless and often disastrous migration to the online world.²

Most recently, the online industry has promoted the absurd myth that the World Wide Web already offers universal access to all human information -- a utopian goal only dreamed of by the Web's inventors. A recent ad for Earthlink Network, the giant Internet service provider, asks: "If you had total access to every piece of knowledge on Earth, where would you go? What would you do? Who would you be?" Yet any serious researcher today who relied solely on the Web would soon discover how limited and disorganized its store of knowledge is. Most scholarly journals, for instance, haven't jumped online because of difficulties funding their electronic distribution. To be sure, innovators are appearing, such as Columbia University Press's CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online), a new clearinghouse for scholarly publications in political science, and the Project Muse series of humanities journals at Johns Hopkins. Still, the myth that "everything's already online" has already begun to erode funding support for traditional print libraries. Hype can do real harm.

John Pavlik, professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and executive director of its Center for New Media, traces the roots of cyberhype to the software industry's product-development tradition: "For years, maybe decades, the software industry has often followed a developmental path where great ideas are trumpeted and never amount to anything more than what has been called 'vaporware.' As the model for developing and marketing new media products has paralleled the track of software development, the same process has occurred. There's a lot of anticipation, and many people are almost evangelical in the way they approach this field."

One reason technology companies feel so compelled to make big promises is that they don't always have much else to sell. Says Steven S. Ross, associate professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism: "In most areas of business, you do a business plan based on historical norms. In high technology generally, and certainly on the Web, there are no historical norms. The industry is changing at an amazing rate. But even in the absence of norms, there's still a big difference between using some common sense to work up a range of possibilities and just making it up outright."

Too often, when companies just "make it up outright," journalists lazily parrot their imaginative leaps -- or are too ignorant to challenge them with hard facts. The absence of old-fashioned editorial standards in much of the online world itself may help amplify the waves of hype. Ross suggests that universities may hold their share of responsibility for cyberhype, too, since it's easy for subsidized researchers working with speedy Internet connections to forget that much of the general public remains stuck with slow modems and expensive service.

Still, it wouldn't matter how many visionary schemes were hyped by executives, journalists, and researchers if the public weren't willing to welcome them. America's love affair with technology long predates the computer era; we've built one machine-driven futuristic dreamland after another, from Victorian-era expositions like the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago to the 1939 World's Fair's Futurama to Disney's Epcot Center today.

Given this heritage, we're easily seduced by the wonders of digital technology, even when the services it provides aren't that spectacular. Sal Stolfo, professor of computer science at Columbia, recalls: "Two nights ago my wife was jumping up and down because she used a new facility she had just downloaded to be able to do an online talk with a friend who lives in Boston. She was ecstatic over this capability -- but it's very low bandwidth. If you picked up the telephone, you'd be able to communicate much more efficiently."

Beyond the general American technophilia that fuels cyberhype are specific circumstances in the digital industry's evolution that have given its hype an unusually idealistic edge. Many of the innovators behind the personal computer trace their roots or their sympathies to the 1960s counterculture, and the industry they built has always tapped into a potent (if contradictory) combination of anti-authoritarian individualism and utopian collectivism. Apple's famous 1984 television ad, introducing the Macintosh as a blow against an Orwellian IBM empire, epitomized the industry's iconoclastic self-image. Says Pavlik: "If you go back to MIT in the '60s, or the Bay Area, there were a lot of people in the computer world who were intellectuals and viewed computer-mediated communication as something that offered a new alternative, full of promise."

In the '90s, the landscape changed with the staggering financial success of Microsoft and the stock market's love affair with technology startup companies in the wake of Netscape's initial public offering. What started with countercultural dreams wound up as a Wall Street mainstay. Today, many technology companies still imbue their promises with '60s notions of self-fulfillment and social change even as they struggle to please investors. Cyberhype knows no ideology; it doesn't worry about internal contradictions as long as its message gets through.

Of course, not every promise made on behalf of technology gets broken; sometimes a claim that appears to be hype proves to be prescient. Stolfo notes: "If you look back in history, didn't the automobile come along with a lot of hype? And can you imagine a society without the automobile? Whose life has it not touched? In a very short period of time, in my opinion, information technology has made a more fundamental change in the way we conduct our daily activities, in the way we behave, than any other thing I can think of in the 40 years I've been alive."

Pavlik suggests that the cyberhype machine may draw our gazes away from real transformations slowly taking place under our noses: "There's all this expectation that suddenly our world will be transformed. And what generally happens is, yes, the world is transformed, but it's not from some sudden introduction of a technology that just sweeps everything from the past aside. Smaller things happen cumulatively, and then one day we look back and realize that it's a different world we live in. Automatic teller machines are an example from banking. It was very incremental, almost unnoticeable -- and now I can hardly even remember going to a human teller to get cash!"

Cyberhype isn't likely to vanish any time soon, so we could all use some good antennae for detecting it. Pavlik suggests some guidelines for separating the serious innovation from the empty promises of vaporware: "Is there a prototype, a proof of concept, that can actually demonstrate the viability of an idea? If there's none, then I think one has to look at it much more skeptically. And I think one also has to look at the motivations of whoever is promoting it. What's their self-interest? Do they have an ulterior motive for whatever they're hyping? It may be to distract you from their real purpose -- there may be something else which they're hoping to slip by or slip in."

For our wildest digital visionaries, every problem has its own techno-fix. So maybe someday one of them will come up with a digital hype-detector to automatically identify and evaluate the technology industry's advertisements and media coverage. Marketers could then promote such a device with inflated promises of what it can do -- followed by a demonstration of its functions by showing how it debunks its own claims.

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Related links...

Typical case of cyberhype, Time magazine

Todd Oppenheimer, "The Computer Delusion," Atlantic Monthly, July 1997

"Myths of Electronic Living" issue, Speed e-zine, University of California, Santa Barbara

Richard E. Sclove, "Cybersobriety," excerpt on virtual communities from Democracy and Technology (NY: Guilford Press, 1995), Loka Institute's "Loka Alert" 2.6 (August 29, 1995)

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1. Gilder, George. Life After Television (NY: Norton, 1994).

2. Caruso, Denise. "Show me the money! How the FUD Factor has online news in its thrall." Columbia Journalism Review July/August 1997.

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SCOTT ROSENBERG, formerly digital culture columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, is technology editor for the Web magazine Salon.

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Photo Credits:
Illustration: Howard R. Roberts
Salesman Photo: Superstock / Special Effects: Howard R. Roberts

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