The book is divided into two parts. Part I looks at how and why we see technology incorrectly. While exploring its downsides, how it bites back, its surprising fragility, and its unpredictability, we will review some tools and insights to make our sometimes tense relationship more pleasant. The nine High Tech Myths are analyzed and debunked. Once the errors are chiseled away, a new and more accurate way of seeing technology change can emerge from the debris.
Part II looks at the constancy of technology change in a broad range of areas. Popular culture, health and safety, fear and anxiety, personal technologies, business - in all of these, history gives us repeated examples that make our experiences today seem unexceptional. This survey, illustrated with stories from thousands of years of technology, should lay to rest the notion that technology change is unique today.

Conventional wisdom says that technology change is exponential, giving us an ever-growing number of exciting new products. According to this view, we live in an unprecedented golden age of technological expansion. Not so, according to Future Hype.
Author Bob Seidensticker, who has an intimate understanding of technology on professional, theoretical, and academic levels, asserts that today's achievements are not unprecedented. He explodes nine major myths of technology, including "Change is exponential," "Products are adopted faster," and "The Internet changes everything," and he argues that we can't control technology change unless we know how it changes. Examining the history of tech hype, Seidensticker uncovers the inaccuracies and misinterpretations that characterize the popular view of technology, explaining how and why this view has been created, and showing how technology change actually works. He concludes with "hype vaccine," specific strategies to become a shrewder technology adopter.

Everyone knows that today's rate of technological change is unprecedented. With technological breakthroughs from the Internet to cell phones to digital music and pictures, everyone knows that the social impact of technology has never been as profound.
But everyone is wrong. In fact, the pace of change isn't notably faster than in times past and most 'revolutionary" technologies are just refinements of past breakthroughs. Take, for example, developments in the telecommunications industry. The telegraph made it possible to communicate instantly across thousands of miles for the first time in human history. That was a big deal. The cell phone allows you to do the same thing walking down the street. It's cool, but it's just not nearly as fundamental a break with the past. Using dozens of entertaining examples, high-tech industry veteran Bob Seidensticker debunks nine technology myths, proving that:

• The rate of change is not exponential (myth #1),
• Important new products don't arrive any faster than they ever have (myth #3),
• The Internet doesn't really change everything (myth #8), and much more.

Future Hype surveys the past few hundred years to show that many of the technologies we now take for granted transformed society in far more dramatic ways than recent developments so often touted as unparalleled and historic. Seidensticker exposes the hidden costs of technology and will help both consumers and businesses take a shrewder position when the next 'essential' innovation is trotted out.