Myths of a Near Future: Advertising the New Economy

Throughout 1999 and 2000, the Internet and e-commerce rapidly became a priority concern for the business media, together with other associated constituencies such as employment agencies, management consultants, business schools, venture capitalists, and the world?s major stock exchanges. Under the umbrella term of ?New Economy? we witnessed the semiotic production of a distributed, heterogeneous, linked, socio-technical assemblage that conceived of the (economic) world in a very specific way. What was perhaps especially contemporary and unique about this phenomenon was its short life span, the extent to which mainstream institutions were so rapidly and willingly implicated, and the paucity of real economic or material referents in which to ground and locate the ?e-revolution?. As one commentator suggested, the idea of the New Economy was in large part not about economies or technologies at all, but about ways of thinking about economies (Frank, 2001). We choose to read New Economy narratives as myths. These myths were of a near future, a future that could almost be seen and grasped. In this paper we document and describe these New Economy myths through a broad semiotic analysis of advertisements published in the Financial Times (UK edition) over the period March 2000 to December 2000. All the advertisements are made available via hyperlinks (at www.ephemeraweb.org/journal), thus allowing the reader to engage with this text in creative ways; which may involve ignoring our analysis.