Tbe conference (DON'T) BELIEVE THE HYPE? aimed to examine hype as a performative force, exploring its mechanisms, effects, and implications across different domains. From the speculative visions of emerging technologies to political rhetoric, from financial bubbles to cultural trends, we seek to understand how hype operates, who benefits from it, and how it transforms the social, media, political, economic and technological landscape.
We invited researchers, journalists, students, artists, designers, policymakers, technologists and communication professionals to contribute to discussions about the nature of hype and its effects.
We had 400 registered participants, 80 presentations in 20 panels, 15 workshops, 8 artworks, and 5 short films. Summarising the diversity and quality of contributions is impossible, but it was just beautiful how young and old, local and international and all these different disciplines intersected:
STS scholars met journalists met psychologists met designers, artists teamed up with engineers, discussing topics from music industry to computer games, from AI to quantum, from Cyberlibertarianism to K-POP Fandom, from shitpublishing to dropping saliva, from TEDIUM to smoke vending machine.
It became apparent that Hype Studies is rich, colorful - and needed. It grows and thrives on interdisciplinary engagement with exchange of topics, perspectives and people from all around the world. And WHAT a beautiful spirit of curiousity, peer-support and fun!
