Definition: A metaphor for online networks and virtual worlds popularized in the early 1990s, first in fiction and then in the mass media. The term is in declining use at present as the online and offline worlds merge.
Example:
Writing in 1998, Kitchin described cyberspace as “probably one of the most universally over-hyped terms of the latter part of the twentieth century.”
Over 20 years later, this has not changed.
Definition: A rapid devaluation of the stock prices in technology companies in late 2000 and 2001, especially those that were based on the internet. Many people attributed this decline to a rationalization in a market that had become inflated by outlandish expectations and hyperbole.
Expansion on the topic:
The crash was a harsh lesson in the dangers of investing in new media companies that had fatally flawed business plans.
Definition: An overly optimistic or pessimistic account of the impact of new media.
A neologism and play on the word hyperbole, referring to the overblown and usually overly optimistic claims for the impact of the internet.
Example:
In 1994, the US vice-president Al Gore’s speech to the International Telecommunications Union, proclaimed that the US-led Global Information Infrastructure initiative would promote “robust and sustainable economic progress, strong democracies, better solutions to global and local environmental challenges, improved health care, and ultimately a greater sense of shared stewardship of our small planet”.
John Brockman’s anthology of interviews with, and short pieces authored by, the “digerati” is an excellent primer on mid-1990s cyberbole
Definition: A follower of nineteenth-century labour activist Ned Ludd, who advocated smashing what was then the new weaving machine.
Now often used as a blanket term for someone who opposes all things new, it has been revived as “neo-Luddism” by critics of new technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who have pointed out the rationality in Ludd’s resistance to forces that were destroying families and communities.
Definition: A political and economic theory that posits the primacy of freedom and especially economic freedom to allow markets to regulate human affairs. Often associated with Russian-American author Ayn Rand (1905–1982) and also linked to some early internet activists.
Definition: An approach to technology that posits unmediated outcomes from the use of technology, and in its extreme form, a kind of self-determination and internal logic to the evolution of technology.
Example:
“Computers are getting faster all the time.”
The writer, if pressed, probably does not believe that, somehow, computers are getting faster on their own, but it is easy to say things like this, given the regular and predictable progress in many technological forms.
Definition: The spread of innovations within a society or market.
Example:
The diffusion of innovations model is associated with communications theorist Everett Rogers, who sought to model the rate of adoption and eventual spread of an innovation in the social system through communication via influential individuals, related businesses, social networks over time.
Rogers’s model identifies different categories of users (including early adopters) and the adoption threshold at which an innovation becomes a mature technology.
Definition: An examination of society that regards law, economy, and the political environment as being interrelated and helping to establish and sustain the social order. In new media studies this typically focuses on an examination of the regulation and ownership of media.
Exemplification: Compared to the diffusion of innovations model, this approach focuses more specifically on the politics and power relations embedded in technological development.
Definition: An approach to the study of technology that emphasizes the importance of understanding how (economic) power has influenced and continues to influence the operation and evolution of technology in society.
Exemplification: Sholle argues:
The computer is a product of social processes from the beginning. The construction of knowledge, economic interests, cultural patterns, spatial arrangements, and political motifs are inscribed into the technology from the very beginning.
Definition: An economy characterized by a high level of dependence, internally and in the form of trade, on knowledge creation, distribution, and exports.
Explanation:
The traditional categories for understanding capital—labour, capital, and exchange—get blurred in a knowledge economy.
This new dynamic makes analysis difficult; and traditional assumptions about workers and bosses, either irrelevant or at least worth reconsidering.
Definition: The practice of gaining unauthorized access to a computer system and carrying out various disruptive actions as a means of achieving political or social goals.
Definition: The use of computers to exchange messages, as with email, forums, blogs, wikis, and instant messaging.
Definition: A mode of inquiry into new media, proposed by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.
He suggested that when one is considering the impact of a new media form, we should ask four questions: What does it enhance? What does it retrieve from the past? What does it change into when pushed to the extreme? What does it erode or obsolesce?