The Price Of Hype
Fall 1986
| Volume 2
| Issue 2
In reading about the exaggerated promotional ploys used by early inventorbarons (“How Did the Heroic Inventors Do It?” by Thomas P. Hughes, Fall 1985), I wonder if today’s jadedness is not in some way a reaction to subsequent barrages of techno-hype.
Students and faculty on most engineering-college campuses today, enamored with their visions of “high tech,” are shunning the industry whose existence is the very foundation of all future pursuits—electricity. Their attitude is just the opposite of that conveyed by the statement “America’s electric-power network … is perhaps our most complex technology” (in “Learning from the Big Blackouts,” in the same issue).
