HYPE REVIEW, II. WHAT IF THE PRODUCT ITSELF IS HYPE?

You've surely noticed, that much of television programming is about...television programming. Much of entertainment is about...other entertainment. Beginning with Entertainment Tonight, the whole celebrity fanmag market boomed. Now it's a culture. "Reality" shows are not about reality. They're about being about reality. Creating their own reality. "News," especially broadcast news, is often about covering events, not the events themselves. "Entertainment news" used to be published for the participants of the entertainment business. Now news about the news and entertainment people easily ranks above world events. So, it's inevitable that the Internet Entertainment and Communications hurricane would become bigger than events or issues of real life, assuming there still is such a thing as "real life." Examples: this conversation about blogging, and disappointment in blogging...essentially, that we can't all be famous, after all.