Clay Shirky is one of my favorite writers about the Internet. Only some of that is because I was the first editor to put his essays in general circulation; the rest is that he’s such a wonderfully clear thinker and writer. We don’t usually agree entirely, but our conversations always leave me more informed than when we started.
His latest is an investigation into the meme “Half the world has never made a phone call.” Clay does what someone should have done a long time ago: he tracks down who first said it, and when, and why. Then he talks about why it probably isn’t true — and why it doesn’t matter one way or another.
