Here's an interesting way to see how technology and news intersect.
Google Trends, a service that tracks how many times a keyword is put into search, showed that MIT's Jonathan Gruber was a virtual unknown in search terms over the past ten years until this year. This month alone, Google Trends gave "Jonathan Gruber" a score of 100 because of the amount of search interest in the topic.
Google Trends measures search terms by the volume of mentions on a scale of 0-100 in a particular region. The app stresses that a score of 100 doesn't mean that everyone in a given region is searching for this topic, but the app is good at measuring where most people are searching for a particular topic.
For example, Google Trends shows that people are searching for "Jonathan Gruber" almost exclusively in the United States.
When the search is broken down by region, however, it shows that the only two regions where "Jonathan Gruber" seems to be sparking an interest are the Washington, D.C. and New York metropolitan areas.
Is there some truth to the claim that those in big cities live in a bubble? Maybe, but the spike in search trends shows that people in Washington are starting to take a closer look at Gruber's claims given the information that's out there.