Source: http://luckypeach.com/the-state-of-ramen...

What’s happened to ramen in the past decade is a microcosm of the larger food world. In 2003, when I was working at Café Boulud, the other cooks and I used to go down to wd~50 after service just to look at the menu and try to envision what the food might look like. That’s how it used to be before the Internet; you would still go to restaurants, look at their menu, and just imagine. You’d order ramen books from Japan and wait weeks for them to arrive, so you could pore over the photos from across the planet.

Now the Internet’s changed everything. People can get all the information they want instantaneously, and that has killed innovation in ramen.