The internet telescope

摘要

The fundamental question of social science, in a nutshell, is this: how can you throw a bunch of people together and end up with not just a bunch of people, but families, companies, markets and societies?rnThe answer, we have long thought, lies in the interactions between individuals and organisations. Measuring those interactions is at last becoming possible as hundreds of millions of people shift their social and economic activities online - to email and social networking services, search engines and e-commerce sites and, increasingly, smartphones. The net is becoming to social science what the telescope was to astronomy: a device for making a previously invisible universe visible.