Location is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One by David R. Bell

Author:David R. Bell [Bell, David R.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Expanding Distances and Shrinking Interests

So, we have the ability to become diverse in our affiliations or more narrow in terms of whom and what we associate with. On balance, and, as indicated by my personal rugby example, balkanization appears to be the stronger force and one nice piece of evidence comes from a study of coauthorship patterns among academics.

Researchers in Canada found that before the widespread availability of the Internet, academic coauthorships were quite diverse (I’ll explain what I mean by this in a moment), if somewhat constrained by geography.9 They wanted to see whether things remained this way after the introduction of the Internet. In particular, they were interested in how “changes in collaboration costs may affect the structure of knowledge production.” Now that is certainly an eloquent way to state a research goal!

Prior to the advent of the Internet, it was relatively common for researchers in broadly related fields but with different focuses to team up and work on something interesting. This kind of diversity is usually seen as a good thing for the creation of overall knowledge.

Perhaps an econometrician from Penn, for example, and a labor economist from Georgetown (a little over one hundred miles away) would write papers together. The latter might provide the key ideas and theory, and the former would crunch the data and work out the empirical findings.

Enter the virtual world of the Internet.

Once the Internet came along, the average geographic distance between coauthors increased. The econometrician from Penn became more likely to team up with someone from farther away—perhaps a coauthor at the University of Zurich.

This is consistent with the theory I described earlier. Affiliations become more about taste and preferences and less about geography when the physical distance between people becomes less of an impediment to communication.

Even more interesting is the finding that coauthors are now more likely to align according to skills and interests versus proximity. The econometrician from Penn became more likely to work with another author with more similar skills; e.g., the colleague from Zurich is more likely to be an econometrician or statistician. (Perhaps someone just like my good friend the statistician Dr. Michael Wolf.10)

Whether this is a good or bad thing is hard to say. But what is clear is that the “death of distance” has in some instances led to more narrowly circumscribed associations.

On the distinctively positive side, the researchers in Canada found that “multi-institutional collaboration” increased significantly post-Internet—by about 40 percent. In the language of economics, there were significant “gains from trade,” with additional researchers (perhaps from universities with underutilized research equipment) coming into proximity with collaborators who had access to a wider portfolio of resources.

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