Buzzwords… It seems like every season there are new words to capture the feelings and activities going on in the cyber security world. What are these new phrases or buzz words? Have any proven to withstand time and change in the cyber security world? What spurs these new phrases to come into heavy use? I would love to hear what you all think! I will keep a running list and add them to this blog as responses come in.
Megan,
I’m currently working on a paper….perhaps a book, who knows?, on Rhetoric in Technology. Your questions are interesting: I see no other industry with as much rhetorical turnover as there appears to be within tech and as an extension cyber.
In my humble opinion there is a two-factor cause for this: 1. HW changes so quickly (Moore’s Law) that the SW world drives towards that pace. SW innovation, however, is actually much slower than HW innovation and therefore new SW technologies are hyped well in advance of their reality. When reality hits the actual term may be different than the hype buzzword. 2. Money: Technologists are trained to think about the future, how to improve current capabilities, and how to integrate the latest technology. Therefore the marketing wing of most tech companies play to that and provide briefings on the “latest, cutting edge” and drive up the hype factor around a word. Hype=investment, and investment=dollars. Crude, but true.
That being said, here are a couple of my favorite buzzwords that have been, or currently are, very popular:
ASP, Brick-and-Mortar, Virtualization, Cloud, SaaS, Social Media. None are Cyber, per se, but I bet you have your own lingo going there.
Here’s a cool little graph on google showing the trending of certain terms: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=SOA%2C%20cloud%20computing%2Csaas%2Cvirtualization%2Csocial%20media&date=1%2F2007%2040m&cmpt=q
Mike
Technology unfortunately is driven by the Prometheus intent. So it is full of fad to promote consumerism ultimately creating uneven distribution of wealth. There is no doubt that technology is changing at a much rapid speed and rebranding of the value proposition is much desired. Moore’s law applied to the processor speed, and it is still Intel inside the processor, who has become faster and smarter. Also, have related peripherals changed at much dramatic speed. But what has not changed is the bell curve in the way money got distributed. Change will remain a fancy word, until world remains in fleeting beliefs.
Change changes with season, while poverty and ignorance remains constantly increasing.
Just today i realized that my podcast mash-up site has closed. It has been few months since they pulled their SocialTV mash-up site. Reading at their site you can see the evolution from exclusive to inclusive for the way technology was delivering content. With that, buzzword Social TV emerged. This is one of the reason.
http://splashcast.net/