At least not the way the hypemasters want you to think. Tom Coates is using a small controversy about bloggers trying their hands at viral marketing to spew his gall about the incessentant hype about how the latest New Internet Thing is going to change the world forever:
I’m totally fed up of people standing up and waving a flag for the death of institutions based on sketchy information and a vague belief in the rightness of their cause – and I’m also slightly sick of more moderate voices being drowned out under the revolutionary fervour of people fresh with their first wave of excitement about user-generated content on the web. Weblogs suffer from this enormously. Someone said that every journalist that writes about weblogs thinks that the year they discovered them is the year weblogs went mainstream. I’ve watched this for almost six years now. I now need people to think about what’s more likely to happen – that big media organisations, and governments and businesses will dry up and evaporate, or that some of them will adapt and change to a new ecology, renegotiate their place in the world and have a role in fashioning and supporting whatever it is that’s coming?
Whatever is on the horizon – social software, social media, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, technology everywhere, permanent connectivity, media distribution, mass amateurisation, disintermediation – it’s going to have an enormous impact on our lives. But that impact will probably seem relatively subtle and gradual to those people living through it, and its true effects will probably not be fully recognised for a hell of a long time. So let’s try and be a bit humble about the whole thing, eh? Let’s get excited about possible futures, let’s argue for the changes we think should happen, let’s present ideas and theories and ideas and business models and look to the future and test them and explore them. But please, no more religious wars of us versus them, big versus small, old versus new… We’ve got enough entrenched dogmatic opinions in the world already without creating new ones…
Hear hear. I’ve been on the internet since 1994, not that long compared to some, and I’ve seen so many of these hypes come past. The internet itself, the web, push technology (remember this?) Java, Linux, Open Source, blogs, RSS, etc. etc. None of these things changed the world “forever”, but all of them (except push) changed the world in ways we still barely understand and won’t understand until at
least half a century or more has passed. Just like Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution, it is still “too early to tell” what the impact of the internet is.
