The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2)

by Michael Crichton

“Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global un...

In summation: "Internet = end of innovation". Rather myopic prediction from Crichton (a self-described computer aficionado), wouldn't you say? Without the Internet to birth ideas like Netflix or YouTube, filmmaking would've likely gone stagnant years ago as the movie industry kept regurgitating the same old ideas via reboots/remakes/sequels. Yet, for all their faults, streaming video services like YouTube, Netflix, et al have allowed indie filmmakers to reach previously untold audiences with their art and to reinvigorate filmmaking with whole new ideas that wouldn't have been heard otherwise. In fact, I daresay the opposite has happened: instead of seeing the "top ten books, records, movies, ideas", we're seeing too many ideas. New ideas -- good and bad -- are all over the place now. Why create when fifteen people have likely already created the same exact thing and uploaded it to their blogs, Twitter accounts, or YouTube channels by the time you've written your first sentence? I'm sure that gets more than a little discouraging for some content creators at times. If anything, we're being inundated by too much data, not too little on endless repeat (and certainly not "the top ten" drowning everything else out or replacing genuine innovation).