As a metaphor the internet affords all sorts of sensational and melodramatic language. I regular receive emails from public relations professionals representing clients who claim they are starting a revolution or changing the world forever.

Last week I got such a message regarding an announcement from Cisco, who are "the leading supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet." In this email, I was told that Cisco would make an announcement that would "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, business, and government" and that was all they could say.

Yesterday Cisco made their announcement, the introduction of their next generation router, the CRS-3, and the media seemed to walk right into the hype.

Will this new Cisco router change the internet? Sure, why not. The internet is an evolving ecosystem in which each encounter, no matter how small, in some way changes the internet. The larger issue is why the media, and by extension the public, fall for language that makes those who repeat it without thinking, appear as suckers.

If there were journalists covering this announcement who really understood their subject, they would be asking questions and probing into why and how this new router will change the internet forever. Instead this was a great example of how public relations slides through the media and is then presented to the public as journalism.

For example let's quickly dissect two passages from the Cisco press release, and indicate how a journalist should respond:

The Cisco CRS-3 enables unified service delivery of Internet and
cloud services with service intelligence spanning service provider
Internet Protocol Next-Generation Networks (IP NGNs) and data center.

This sentence is a classic case of jargon overload. Pack as much loaded language into the sentences and paragraphs so that journalists are left with no choice but to swallow the whole spin.

Instead what the public needs are media stories that break down these words, that ask questions such as how and why this will make the web and internet different than it is today. What impact will these new routers have on network neutrality, the costs of internet access, concerns of privacy, and the rise of surveillance. These are important concerns that the public clearly cares about, but the media lacks the expertise to connect the dots.

Let's look at the second passage from the press release I want to bring to your attention:

AT&T, one of the world's largest telecommunications companies,
recently tested the Cisco CRS-3 in a successful completion of the
world's first field trial of 100-Gigabit backbone network technology,
which took place in AT&T's live network between New Orleans and Miami.
The trial advances AT&T's development of the next generation of backbone
network technology that will support the network requirements for the
growing number of advanced services offered by AT&T to consumer and
business customers, both fixed and mobile.

Any journalist with an ounce of integrity would know about the EFF's actions against AT&T and the claims of their co-operation with the NSA to monitor all internet traffic. They would therefore be compelled to ask whether one of those network requirements is the ability to monitor every single bit of data that travels through these routers. Yet not a word in any of the coverage.

As an appropriate co-incidence, yesterday I participated in an interactive workshop on Surveillance and Civic Action that was organized by friends from the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, and the New Transparency Project.

At this workshop we covered a lot of ground breaking research that documents the extent to which surveillance is used and abused in our society. We plan to continue this conversation, via the formation of a Surveillance Club to bring together diverse perspectives around a subject seemingly so difficult to fully measure. Please join us.