Much like technology, language constantly evolves… often rapidly. Just think of how different slang was in the 1980s. Maybe you remember when “bad” meant “good” and people unironically voiced their opinions using words like “rad” or “bogus?”
Many of these terms sound hopelessly outdated today. Similarly, at the intersection of IT and language, a constantly shifting lexicon describes changes to computer technologies powering our world.
In the early days of the internet, journalists and politicians tossed around buzz-worthy phrases like “information superhighway” and “cyberspace” to describe the unfamiliar virtual arena. But now, we’re all living in a hyper-connected world by default. While using those buzzwords might have made you seem ahead of the curve in the 1990s, you’d seem out of touch if you used them in a conversation today.
Sometimes buzz-worthy phrases hold up — we’ve used the term “social media” for decades and it continues to grow in popularity, according to Google Trends (which tracks search volume over time). But other times words come and go like quick-passing fads.
In a few short years, words can grow in popularity or fall out of favor completely. In particular, technology vendors love to use buzzwords to hype up the products they sell. Sometimes, these phrases catch on, but sometimes they fall flat. In August 2022, we asked members of the Spiceworks Community to name the worst buzzwords used by marketers. According to an informal poll of 400+ IT professionals, these were at the top of the list:
In many ways, these buzzwords were a product of their times. Back in the summer of 2022, Facebook had just changed to Meta and many were just starting to venture back outside during the COVID-19 pandemic. During that time, many were declaring in-person work was dead, due to the “new normal” of working working remotely, enabled by tools like Zoom.
Using Google Trends, let’s examine how these (unofficial) top buzzwords of 2022 have held up over the last couple of years.
Notably, the popularity of the term “metaverse” was fleeting, as the promise of this virtual world fell flat once people started going outside again and people arguably realized that wearing silly goggles on your face was not going to be the future of the internet… at least not yet. After a steep decline for over a year, there was one blip in October 2023 where search traffic for “metaverse” jumped, but that was only due to news stories covering layoffs in Meta’s VR division.
Now in 2024, how has the popularity of the rest of these buzzwords held up… has it gone up, or have these terms fallen out of favor?
If the popularity of all five of our top buzzwords of 2022 were a 100m dash, you could say that “metaverse” got a huge jump on the competition at the start. But after 20m, a new competitor, “artificial intelligence” broke from the pack, pushing all the way to the front. Search volume for “artificial intelligence” peaked in April of 2023, soon after the OpenAI released ChatGPT 4, when the public was exploring what the model was capable of.
But rather than falling off completely, searches for “artificial intelligence” have remained hugely popular over time with AI remaining the top IT buzzword by search volume, while “metaverse” has fallen all the way to last place.
Meanwhile, search volume for “cloud computing”, “big data” , and “new normal” have been consistent over the last couple of years, neither spiking or falling significantly. In other words, these buzzwords (which have been around for a long time already) have staying power, and won’t likely fall off any time soon.
