After reading Chapter 1 of Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy, I don't believe it at all.

He argues that we of the information age are, like the autistics among us, obsessively order-seeking. For an example he touts the iPod, which, he says, gives us the ability to order our music collections.

It seems to me just the opposite. Back when we had LPs, we kept them in order: alphabetically, or by genre, or color, or something else. Everyone had their own system, but systems they had. For some it was casual, just a way to find the needed vinyl, but other folks obsessed, loving and memorizing their orderings. Contrariwise, isn't the special quality of digital music libraries (which Cowen calls "the iPod") just the fact that they don't require ordering? Computers do search so well that we can just free-associate: we don't have to impose any structure.

The other examples are just as mystifying: Google, FaceBook, Google Earth, Delicious, and Flickr, to remember the most salient. All these services allow me to search and zoom in directly to the item I want, just by using some loose words associated with it. They dispense with my old ordering practices.

One kind of order we see every day is the chronological order. I'm a big fan of this order. But Cowen makes something extra of it when he glosses that "Your 'news feed,' now on the main Facebook personal page, orders what your friends are up to." This surely misses the point: Yes, the news items are in the order of their happening, but that's only because recent stuff is most important. That's a feature of human life that has nothing to do with an autistic passion for order. The autistic kindergartner Cowen cites, who is fascinated with railway schedules, is indulging a different urge than us Googlers.

One of Cowen's themes is that autism isn't a disability, that it's a condition whose strengths are actually valuable in an information-centric world. That may be, but not because of modern gadgets like digital music and Google.