Sunday, August 29, 2010

The allure of "trending now"

One of the joys of our always connected world is that one can know the pulse of the universe by viewing the "trending now" section on Yahoo or Google. Our fellow space travelers are typing in words into a search engine. The search engine shares the top ten current searches with the rest of the world which reinforces the search terms. We click aimlessly on search terms that others have chosen because we do not want to be "out of the loop". If tomatoes is trending than I want to know why tomatoes is trending. I do not want to be the only person at the "watering hole" who did not know.

No doubt this need to be connected with our fellow travelers is a comparative advantage from an evolutionary perspective because we would want to know where the lions are or where the safe watering hole is.