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Hype Cycle: Five Phases Hype in New Media Criticisms See Also References Further Reading External Links

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75 views4 pages

Hype Cycle: Five Phases Hype in New Media Criticisms See Also References Further Reading External Links

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Ahmed Zakaria
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Hype cycle

The hype cycle is a branded graphical presentation


developed and used by the American research,
advisory and information technology firm Gartner to
represent the maturity, adoption, and social application
of specific technologies. The hype cycle claims to
provide a graphical and conceptual presentation of the
maturity of emerging technologies through five
phases.

The Gartner hype cycle has been criticised for a lack


of evidence that it holds, and for not matching well
with technological uptake in practice.
Hype cycle

Contents
Five phases
Hype in new media
Criticisms
See also
References
Further reading
External links

Five phases
Each hype cycle drills down into the five key phases
of a technology's life cycle.

General hype cycle for technology


No. Phase Description
A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept
1 Technology Trigger stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable
products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied
2 Peak of Inflated Expectations
by scores of failures. Some companies take action; most don't.
Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver.
Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investment continues only if
3 Trough of Disillusionment
the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early
adopters.
More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to
crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-
4 Slope of Enlightenment
generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises
fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider
viability are more clearly defined. The technology's broad market
5 Plateau of Productivity
applicability and relevance are clearly paying off. If the technology has more
than a niche market then it will continue to grow.[1]

The term "hype cycle" and each of the associated phases are now used more broadly in the marketing of new
technologies.

Hype in new media


Hype (in the more general media sense of the term "hype"[2]) plays a large part in the adoption of new media.
Analyses of the Internet in the 1990s featured large amounts of hype,[3][4][5] and that created "debunking"
responses.[2] A longer-term historical perspective on such cycles can be found in the research of the economist
Carlota Perez.[6] Desmond Roger Laurence, in the field of clinical pharmacology, described a similar process
in drug development in the seventies.

Criticisms
There have been numerous criticisms[7][8][9][10] of the hype cycle, prominent among which are that it is not a
cycle, that the outcome does not depend on the nature of the technology itself, that it is not scientific in nature,
and that it does not reflect changes over time in the speed at which technology develops. Another is that it is
limited in its application, as it prioritizes economic considerations in decision-making processes. It seems to
assume that a business' performance is tied to the hype cycle, whereas this may actually have more to do with
the way a company devises its branding strategy. A related criticism is that the "cycle" has no real benefits to
the development or marketing of new technologies and merely comments on pre-existing trends. Specific
disadvantages when compared to, for example, technology readiness level are:

The cycle is not scientific in nature, and there is no data or analysis that would justify the cycle.
With the (subjective) terms disillusionment, enlightenment and expectations it can not be
described objectively or clearly where technology now really is.
The terms are misleading in the sense that one gets the wrong idea what they can use a
technology for. The user does not want to be disappointed, so should they stay away from
technology in the Trough of Disillusionment?
No action perspective is offered to move technology to a next phase.
This appears to be a very simplified impulse response of an elastic system representable by a
differential equation. Perhaps more telling would be to formulate a system model with solutions
conforming to observable behavior.
An analysis of Gartner Hype Cycles since 2000[10] shows that few technologies actually travel through an
identifiable hype cycle, and that in practice most of the important technologies adopted since 2000 were not
identified early in their adoption cycles.

See also
AI winter, in referring to periods of disillusionment with artificial intelligence.
Product lifecycle
Kondratiev wave
Roy Amara

References
1. 1963-, Chaffey, Dave (2016). Digital marketing. Ellis-Chadwick, Fiona (Sixth ed.). Harlow:
Pearson. pp. 140–141. ISBN 9781292077611. OCLC 942844494 (https://www.worldcat.org/ocl
c/942844494).
2. Flew, Terry (2008). New Media: An Introduction (3rd ed.). South Melbourne: OUP Australia and
New Zealand. ISBN 978-0-19-555149-5.
3. Negroponte, Nicolas (1996-01-03). Being Digital (1st ed.). Vintage. ISBN 978-0-679-76290-4.
4. Kelly, Kevin (1997-09-01). "New Rules For The New Economy" (https://www.wired.com/wired/a
rchive/5.09/newrules.html). Wired. 5 (9). Retrieved 2011-12-30.
5. Dyson, Esther (1997). Release 2.0: A Design For Living In The Digital Age (https://archive.org/
details/release20designf00dyso) (1st ed.). New York: Broadway Books.
6. Henton, Doug; Held, Kim (2013). "The dynamics of Silicon Valley: Creative destruction and the
evolution of the innovation habitat". Social Science Information. 52 (4): 539–557.
doi:10.1177/0539018413497542 (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0539018413497542). ISSN 0539-
0184 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0539-0184).
7. First published in the 2005 blog:
Veryard, Richard (September 16, 2005). "Technology Hype Curve" (http://demandingchange.bl
ogspot.com/2005/09/technology-hype-curve.html). Retrieved March 10, 2016.
8. Weinberg, Gerald; et al. (September 5, 2003). HypeCycle (http://www.davewsmith.com/ayewiki/
scribble.cgi?read=HypeCycle). AYE Conference. Retrieved March 10, 2016.
9. Aranda, Jorge (October 22, 2006). "Cheap shots at the Gartner Hype Curve" (http://catenary.wo
rdpress.com/2006/10/22/cheap-shots-at-the-gartner-hype-curve/). Retrieved March 10, 2016.
10. "8 Lessons from 20 Years of Hype Cycles" (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-y
ears-hype-cycles-michael-mullany). LinkedIn Pulse. 2016-12-07. Retrieved 2017-01-04.

Further reading
Jackie Fenn & Mark Raskino (2008). Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right
Innovation at the Right Time. Harvard Business Press. ISBN 978-1-4221-2110-8.

External links
Hype Cycle Research Methodology (http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologie
s/hype-cycle.jsp), the official materials.

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