Are Big Ideas Over?

by Zoë Pollock

A couple of weeks ago, Neal Gabler accused the internet of killing them:

Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world.

Will Wilkinson fights back:

I'd bet my entire future income that more people read and discussed Kant last year than in 1950, or that the size of the class of people who study and produce ideas for a living is now much larger than it was in 1950.

It seems likely that intellectual specialisation and the division of labour have reduced the average "bigness" of the thoughts studied and produced by people in the ideas sector. Indeed, as an epistemological matter, breaking big problems into smaller problems and tackling them in a socially distributed way by means of a reliable, shared method of inquiry would tend to suggest that that the declining "size" of the average idea is correlated with increasing accuracy in distinguishing the true ideas from the false ones.

Kevin Drum came to a similar conclusion:

[B]ig ideas may or may not have been more common half a century ago than they are now, but at least back then we knew where to find them and we have a widely understood set of social conventions about how to discuss them. We haven't yet really figured that out for electronic media, and that makes the discussion of big ideas chaotic enough and inchoate enough that it can often seem as if the ideas themselves don't exist anymore. But I suspect they do. We just have to learn how to talk about them in a new language.

Megan Garber credits electronic media with being the Big Idea:

The idea of the idea is evolving. We don’t treat Google like a Big Idea — though, of course, that’s most definitely what it is; we treat it like Google. Ditto Facebook, ditto Twitter, ditto Reddit and Wikipedia. Those new infrastructures merge idea and practice, ars and tecnica, so seamlessly that it’s easy to forget how big (and how Big) the ideas that inform them actually are.