A Brief Introduction to "The Dot Com Bubble"

Pretty much all modern society relies on the internet in some form or another. Take the coronavirus crisis for example that we have all lived through this past year, how many Team’s calls did you join or how many Zoom quizzes did you participate in? How many Netflix series’ did you complete? How many hours spent on Youtube? The answer to all of these for me and many others, is far too many. However, would any of this have been possible without a not so small event that happened in the late 90s/early 2000s called “The Dot Com Bubble”? That is something I want to research further.

 

A Zoom Quiz Night

In my opinion from research I have done so far there appears to be two possible start dates for “The Dot Com Bubble”. One of these seem to be around the time of the Netscape Communications, Inc., initial public offering, with Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News calling it the “Big Bang of the Internet stock bubble”. The other is the period before the Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan’s now infamous “irrational exuberance” speech titled “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society”.

 

 

The Bubble Triange - Quinn and Turner

My aim is to look at both of these events as the starting point for “The Dot Com Bubble” and using the Bubble Triangle (this likens a bubble to a fire, with Marketability being the oxygen, money as fuel and speculation as heat) framework set out by Quinn and Turner in “Boom and Bust”, go into the bubble in greater depth, trying to understand if there was a specific spark that may have led to the bubble. In the next few weeks, I hope to touch on the events discussed earlier in more detail, the events that unfolded and the impact the bubble had on the economy afterwards, and finally talk about how it shapes our lives today.