Tyler Cowen quotes a paragraph from Mark Pagel:
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
Since Facebook is part of the Internet (try to imagine a Facebook without the Internet—basically the personals column of a newspaper or maybe a scrapbook pasted on a bulletin board), if this means anything at all it appears to me that Mr. Pagel is using “Internet” as a synonym for what might be called “the Googlesphere”—the results of a Google search and the pages to which the search links.
However, the Internet is not the Googlesphere. I think that assuming that it is places excessive confidence in Google’s algorithms which, after all, have the primary purpose of securing ad revenue for the company.
I’m guilty of violations myself although I do try to crosscheck the searches I make using both Google and Bing. I note that dogpile.com is down to Google, Yahoo, and Bing. That’s a shocking loss of diversity in just ten years.
