media circuses

This page discusses media scepticism, infatuation and received wisdom about dotcoms, the 'new economy' and telecommunications during the boom and crash.

It covers -

• introduction
• antecedents
• cheerleading and catcalls
• post mortems
• dot-com mags
• next time round

     introduction

Old and new journals, newspapers and broadcast programs understandably embraced the idea of an exciting 'new economy' centred on the internet, one that

• would defy traditional notions about profitability
• featured iconoclastic gurus and unwashed young entrepreneurs who'd suddenly become billionaires courtesy of "the web thing"
• involved the death of 'old business' (eg the 'old media' 'dinosaurs')
• promised a cornucopia of goodies for young and old

As Richard Barbrook perceptively commented, in the digital millennium we'd all be rich and hip (although apparently the geeks, private equity fund managers and public relations czars would be richer and hipper).

The bubbles lifted the fortunes of self-consciously new economy journals such as Industry Standard, Fast Company, Business 2.0, Forbes ASAP (under George Gilder), Wired and Red Herring. It is perhaps unsurprising that several expired soon after the crash.

     antecedents

Past communication revolutions, such as the telegraph and radio, have been marked by proliferation of journals for the new industry and the general public, such as The Telegrapher and Radio Age, now mostly mouldering in the dustier stacks of major libraries.

They have also been marked by enthusiasm in much of the existing media about investment opportunities, elimination of what would now be characterised as the business cycle, enhanced social relationships and cultural efflorescence. It is rewarding, for example to compare the Bulletin of 1927 and 1997 or the Wall Street Journal and New York tabloids in the same years.

Similarities in what is said - and how it is said - reflect the enduring shape of human expectations and use by journalists/editors of templates (past stories provide a model for conceptualising new technologies, new booms).

Similarities in coverage also reflect the nature of much of the mass media during periods of boom, concerned with entertainment rather than analysis, affirming received wisdom and even celebrating achievement rather than questioning whether the boom is made from air.

Journalists, after all, are people - just like investors and advocates such as brokers. Many are dependendent on media releases, interviews with promoters and experts. Most do not question the 'reality check' provided by rival publications and peers, so that journalism is a chorus of assent, consumers get the media that they deserve and 'investigative journalism' is rediscovered every ten years or so.

     cheerleading and catcalls

Although we are wary about the condescension of posterity, the lack of intellectual rigour - and indeed disregard for fact - in much of the 'new economy' literature during the bubble is quite striking. In essence, much of the literature functioned as cheerleading - lots of noise, colour, movement, adulation of heroes, expressions of contempt for those unfortunates (naysayers, regulators, the 'offline' and 'old industry') who were not surfing the digital zeitgeist.

The bubble was also inflated by 'dried trees encased in cardboard', ie traditional book publishing. Arguably more money was made writing about electronic publishing (and the death of print) than was made by electronic publishers.

The dot-com book became a genre, extending from triumphalist tomes such as Dyson's Release 2.0, Gilder's Telecosm and Rheingold's Homesteading the Electronic Frontier to profiles such as Proddow's Heroes.com and Kait & Weiss's Digital Hustlers: Living Large & Falling Hard in Silicon Alley to corporate vade mecums embracing The One Minute Internet Manager, Siegel's Futurize Your Enterprise and Evans & Wurster's Blown To Bits, often from our favourite fiction publisher Harvard Business School Press.

Others, echoing Fukuyama's proclamation of the end of history, forecast a perpetual boom. Works such as Glassman & Hassett's 1999 Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market looked less prescient in 2000, in contrast to The Internet Bubble by Perkins & Perkins.

     dot com magazines

In characterising The Industry Standard as a paradigm for the dot com bubble one critic commented that

it was founded in 1998, grew so fast that by 2000 it published more ad pages than any magazine in American history, and then, in about the time it takes to blink in astonishment, collapsed in a puddle of debts and bewilderment.

Kenneth Cukier sniffed that

The Industry Standard ... aimed to be "a younger, hipper Business Week". The senior editors at Red Herring modeled the magazine on The Economist, with a splash of Vanity Fair for flavor. Wired, the granddaddy of mass-market tech titles, was considered vulnerable since it was more lifestyle- than business-minded. Fast Company geared itself to that pathetic stratum of middle managers who fed off the tech industry, flattering its readers as "Road Warriors". Business 2.0 - with its tagline "New Economy, New Rules, New Leaders" - aimed even lower, offering formulaic "how-to" articles accompanied by a sausage-shaped mascot. Time-Warner's late entry into the sweepstakes, a publication it unashamedly named eCompanyNow, aimed at those middle-aged organization men who knew they didn't 'get it' but knew they had to pretend that they did.

Memoirs and studies include Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2006), Michael Wolff's BurnRate (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999), James Ledbetter's Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard (New York: PublicAffairs 2003)

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