“I’ll believe it when I see the long-form death certificate.”
If you have friends like mine you probably saw four of five versions of that joke on your Facebook feed this morning.
It’s a phenomenon which I’ll call “spontaneous comedy” and which – in a round about way – illustrates Eli’s worry that the filter bubble could put a damper on creativity and innovation.
Here’s where I’m coming from: New ideas don’t appear from nowhere. Even creative geniuses (or especially creative geniuses) come by their inventions and insights by connecting two earlier innovations or concepts. It’s a process Arthur Koestler popularized as “bisociation” and which nicely explains the “Eureka” moments of everyone from Archimedes to Watson and Crick.
Sometimes we’re all exposed to the same two ideas and a Eureka is “ripe” to happen to a handful of us simultaneously. That’s when you get 7 scientists discovering the cellular basis of all life in 1839. Or, in the case of comedic invention, when everyone is thinking of Obama’s long-form birth certificate and the OBL’s death -and out pop 5 independent “long-form death certificate” jokes.
But while some bisociations are just waiting to click, what makes the rare creatives stand out is their exposure to concepts from seemingly distinct worlds (cultures, academic disciplines, fields of art, etc.) – and, thus, their ability to make connections that their more narrowly-focused peers couldn’t see.
That’s something Eli wants us to keep our eye on. What happens when we lose exposure to ideas and concepts because our filter bubbles is blocking them out? We may all be getting a chuckle out of the same jokes – but how many inventions, insights and innovations will we miss out on?
(cross-posted from thefilterbubble.com)
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