One of Marginal Revolution’s earliest posts was about Tyler luring Alex to lunch. Tyler’s contention was that, on the margin, Alex’s time was better used reading journal articles rather than writing them and that having lunch was more like reading than writing. QED, Alex should come to lunch (which he did).
What does the growth of social media mean for Tyler’s famed lunches? Might the blogosphere and Twitter-sphere ultimately lead to fewer lunches between Alex and Tyler?
If we take “writing” to mean the creation of information and “reading” to mean the consumption of information, social media creates incentives to engage in both. Blogging and Twitter make it easier to both create original content and share that content. So if instead of writing a paper Alex was about to post on Marginal Revolution, change his Facebook status, and tweet when Tyler asked him to go to lunch, would the chicken tikka still be as good an alternative? While blogs posts and tweets may not have the same value as an academic publication, the audience is many times larger and now contains other economists and smart people interested in the topic, all willing to give feedback.
Of course, those same econ-bloggers are writing their own blog posts and tweeting, so there is more interesting material out there to consume. Alex can consume Tyler’s insights (and the insights of other Masonomics bloggers) via blogs, instead of actually having lunch with him.
On the other hand, the increased capacity to produce and consume information on the Internet might lead to more lunches. Alex can talk about his most recent post and go into more depth about the topic. The other lunch-goers can talk about their posts and tweets, or about something else in the blogosphere. The more stuff out there, the more there is to talk about at lunch.
In addition to sharing information, Alex and the others can signal how smart and clever they are by mentioning interesting blogs no-one else has seen yet, or by having original insights about posts and tweets everyone has read. (If lunch is all about signaling, then it doesn’t matter too much whether everyone reads the same blogs and follows the same people on Twitter or not; the point is to show off intellectual agility, not to share information.)
In economic terms, whether the income effect of having more stuff to talk about in person outweighs the substitution effect of the falling opportunity cost of creating and consuming information on the Internet is an empirical question and depends on the people involved. In reality, it is probably the case that the relative ease and low time commitment of communicating via social media make it possible to do all those things and still go out for lunch.
Every week we bring you in-depth interviews with leading thinkers and entrepreneurs from the world of technology. The most recent episode features 