Local yokels

Local yokels
Jul 1st 2009 From The Economist print edition
Electronic communications may have shrunk, rather than expanded, horizons


THE rise of the internet was supposed to create a global village, in which people would be as likely to have friends in the antipodes as in their own street. Poppycock, of course. But the idea that it might instead have shrunk people’s horizons is truly counter-intuitive. Yet that is what Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem suspect. Their evidence is indirect, and from a strange source—the spread of babies’ names. But it does suggest that something worthy of investigation is going on.
The two researchers’ study of the spread of new names was prompted by their discovery that the relationship between the number of private e-mails sent in America and the distance between sender and recipient falls off far more steeply than they expected. People are overwhelmingly e-mailing others in the same city, rather than those far away.
That says something about human relations, but not how they have changed since e-mail became ubiquitous. So Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy needed to find something pertinent that bridged the period in question and might thus shed more light on their result. In an inspired piece of lateral thinking, they decided to look at how babies’ names spread.