If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word "publishing" means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says "publish," and when you press it, it's done.

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.

The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.