Is social networking making us dumber?

Another great conversation at the Edge weaves together a number of themes I’ve been thinking about lately, like scientific revolutions, big data, learning from models, filter bubbles and the balance between content creation and consumption. I can’t embed, or do it full justice, so go watch the video or read the transcript (the latter is a nice rarity these days).

Pagel’s fundamental hypothesis is humans as social animals are wired for imitation more than innovation, for the very good reason that imitation is easy, while innovation is hard, error-prone and sometimes dangerous. Better communication intensifies the advantage to imitators, as it has become incredibly cheap to observe our fellows in large networks like Facebook. There are a variety of implications of this, including the possibility that, more than ever, large companies have strong incentives to imitate through acquisition of small innovators rather than to risk innovating themselves. This resonates very much with Ventana colleague David Peterson’s work on evolutionary simulation of the origins of economic growth and creativity.

Continue reading “Is social networking making us dumber?”