Layton: Don’t believe all the hype about ‘hype’

You are about to see a sentence that could potentially change the way you look at every other… You are about to see a sentence that could potentially change the way you look at every other sentence for the rest of your life. It is unique and elusive, and its creation has been plagued with problems and controversy. Early reviews of the sentence are touting it as masterful, and the sentence has high expectations to become radically popular (or even make a lot of money). Are you ready? Here goes …

Hype.

Yes, that’s the sentence. Are you a little letdown? I’m not surprised — you were potentially pumped up to read a revelatory sentence based on the excitement I instilled in you before you actually read it.

Welcome to the dastardly deceptive phenomenon known as hype.

Hype, by definition, is the extravagant and intensive promotion of a product, but as it is more commonly recognized today, it’s when a product experiences an utterly formulaic series of spikes and falls in public interest.

The mass media steers and directs the flow, but it is the potential consumers of the product that do the dirty work — mostly through the tangled web of social networking sites that seemingly have no commercial purpose other than generating awareness as quickly as possible.

One recent example of a film that has ridden the hype wave with outrageous success is “Paranormal Activity,” the latest little-indie-horror-that-could in the same vein as “The Blair Witch Project.” The movie’s plot (and quality) is irrelevant — what matters here is that a film that cost around $15,000 to make is bringing in millions of dollars simply because the promoters knew how to get people talking.

It has been a top trending topic on Twitter for over a week now, and though I have heard mixed reviews from people who actually saw the film (again, much like the response “Blair Witch” received), the film is only poised to grow, expand and make even more money.

The hype machine isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as consumers can keep their expectations in check with reality. Regardless of how much we pump something up in our minds, the chances of the product being revolutionary (or even meeting our expectations) are depressingly middling.

Giving into excessive hype doesn’t make the consumer stupid, just a little overzealous. “Where the Wild Things Are” has been one of the most hyped-up movies in recent memory, and while it went through the backlash process (an entirely different concept worthy of its own column) months ago for supposedly being “too scary for kids,” it is getting rave advance reviews.

Once this occurs, however, the question is raised of hype’s impact on a consumer’s judgment. Do we think something is good, or perhaps a lot is an amount of critical leniency, simply because it was hyped up? I wish I could say yes, but it’s not always so clear.

I can’t pass judgment on WTWTA or “Paranormal Activity,” but I will actively avoid the trending topics page on Twitter and shut out my friends’ proclamations of “It’s SOOOO good, man!” because I prefer to perform the manual labor of judgment on my own — I don’t need hype to steal my thunder.