From the Toronto Star: The Net and our shrinking horizons: A study of how baby names spread in the U.S. suggests the Web isn’t so world wide after all.
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 counterintuitive. Yet that is what Drs. 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.
