"Spreading quicker" may not be the best question to ask. The question I'm more interested in is, What is the relationship between speed of communication, and the curve that describes innovation over time?
A good model for this is the degree of genetic isolation in a genetic algorithm. Compare two settings for a GA. One allows mating between any two organisms in the population. Another has many subpopulations, and allows genetic exchange between subpopulations less frequently.
Plot the fitness of the most-fit organism in each population by generation. The first GA, which has fast genetic communication, will initially outstrip the second, but it will plateau at a lower level of fitness, and all the organisms in the population will be identical, and evolution will stop. This is called premature convergence.
The second GA, with restricted genetic communication, will catch up and pass the fitness of the first GA, usually continuing on to a much higher optimum, because it maintains homogenous subpopulations (which allows adaptation) but a diverse global population (which prevents premature convergence).
Think about the development of pop music. As communication technology improved, pop stars like Elvis could be heard, seen, and their records marketed and moved across the entire country more efficiently than marketing local musicians, and replaced live performers with recorded music. On one hand, you could live in Peoria and listen to the most-popular musicians in the country. On the other, by 1990, American pop music had nearly stopped evolving. Rebecca Black could become popular across the nation in a single week, but the amount of innovation or quality she produced was negligible.
Basically, rapid communication gives people too much choice. They choose things comfortably similar to what they know. Isolation is needed to allow new things to gain an audience before they're stomped out by the dominant things.
You need to state your preferences as a function of the long-term trajectory of the entropy of ideas, rather than as any instantaneous quantity.
Basically, rapid communication gives people too much choice. They choose things comfortably similar to what they know. Isolation is needed to allow new things to gain an audience before they're stomped out by the dominant things.
There's a parralel view of innovation here that argues a positive linear relationship with speed of communication and innovation. I first saw it made by Simon Wardley , and I'll try to summarize below.
I think it does among the cognitive elite, and that this explains the rise of complex but good ideas such as applied rationality and Effective altruism. I'm less sure about other groups.
The Internet increases the speed and the convenience of communication vastly. It also makes it much easier for people with shared interests to get in contact.
This will of course lead to a tremendous increase in the amount of false or useless information. But it will also lead to an increase in true and relevant information.
Now members of the cognitive elite are, or so I claim, reasonably good at distinguishing between good and bad ideas. They do this not the least by finding reliable sources. They will quickly pass this, mostly true information, on to other members of the cognitive elite. This means that the higher pace of information dissemination will translate into a higher pace of learning true ideas, for this group.
What about non-elite groups? I'm not sure. On the one hand, they are, by definition, not as good at distinguishing between good and bad ideas. On the other hand, they are likely to be heavily influenced by the cognitive elite, especially in the longer run.
By and large, I think we have cause for optimism, though: good ideas will continue to spread quickly. How could we make them spread even quicker?The most obvious solution is to increase the reliability of information. Notice that while information technology has made it much more convenient to share information quickly, it hasn't increased the reliability of information.
There are a couple of ways of addressing this problem. One is better reputation/karma systems. That would both incentivize people to disseminate true and relevant information, and make it easier to find true and relevant information. (An alternative, and to my mind interesting, version is reputation systems where the scores aren't produced by users, but rather by verified experts.)
Another method is automatic quality-control of information (e.g. fact-checking). Google have done some work on this, but still, it is in its infancy. It'll be interesting to follow the development in this area in the years to come.