Time spent on on-line interaction with members of one’s own, preselected community leaves less time available for actual encounters with a wide variety of people. If physicists, for example, were to concentrate on exchanging email and electronic preprints with other physicists around the world working in the same specialized subject area, they would likely devote less time, and be less receptive to new ways of looking at the world. Facilitating the voluntary construction of highly homogeneous social networks of scientific communication therefore allows individuals to filter the potentially overwhelming flow of information. But the result may be the tendency to overfilter it, thus eliminating the diversity of the knowledge circulating and diminishing the frequency of radically new ideas. In this regard, even a journey through the stacks of a real library can be more fruitful than a trip through today’s distributed virtual archives, because it seems difficult to use the available “search engines” to emulate efficiently the mixture of predictable and surprising discoveries that typically result from a physical shelf-search of an extensive library collection.

* homogeneous: 동종의 ** emulate: 따라 하다

Focusing on on-line interaction with people who are engaged in the same specialized area can _____(A)_____ potential sources of information and thus make it less probable for _____(B)_____ findings to happen.