A great compendium of quotations from the digital-culture thinker Clay Shirky. The choicest of the choice bits:
Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly… The response to distraction, then as now, was social structure. Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it’s our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.
“One of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.”
