Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

You can subscribe to this site via RSS (the humanity!) or .

The Internet Still Isn’t Killing Anything

I really like this datapoint from Jonah Lehrer’s article about how social networking isn’t replacing face-to-face socializing.

[In the 90s internet boom many predicted technology would kill communication as we know it,] But the data show that the opposite has occurred: Cities and face-to-face interaction have become even more valuable. As Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, notes in his recent book “The Triumph of the City,” business travel has dramatically increased since the invention of email. Attendance at business conferences has spiked since the invention of video-conferencing. Businesses still pay hefty rents to be downtown.

As I’ve said in the past, the internet isn’t killing anything.

August 6, 2011