We've been told repeatedly that the age of digital information would help people congregate around idiosyncratic interests, inspire producers to serve infinite niche markets, and make everybody more diversely and individualistically happy.

But what if the Internet age is making cultural consumers more herd-like? Is the world of online culture more homogenized than the offline environment? The analysis behind this graph would indicate that we are now less likely to purchase obscure niche products.

While each customer on average experiences more unique products in Internet World, the recommender system generates a correlation among the customers. To use a geographical analogy, in Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop.

... Here are Lorentz curves for Internet World (blue) and Offline World (green), in which the products are lined up in order of increasing popularity along the x axis, and the cumulative choices for those products is plotted up the Y axis.