Clay Shirky

4 results

Moments of idle reflection and minutes of frustrating inactivity have been rendered a thing of the past by the devices in our pockets. Photograph: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg
How smartphones killed off boredom

Next month see the 10th anniversary of the release of the first iPhone and the start of a smartphone revolution that has shaped the intervening decade(...)

Concerns over concentrated media ownership will be nothing compared to the anxiety over the power wielded by Zuckerberg and Facebook. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA Wire
Davin O’Dwyer: Does social media feed into political upheaval?

For political addicts in the western world, recent elections have offered more twists than this year’s Premier League. We have just had an electoral(...)

During the first RTÉ debate of the campaign, 69,000 tweets were sent, turning #LeadersDebate into the number two trending topic on Twitter worldwide. Photograph: Alan Place/FusionShooters
Mark Little: Twitter shaped and widened Irish election debate

It’s hard not to romanticise election campaigns of old. They seemed tactile beyond measure, with candidates knocking on endless doors and pressing unt(...)

TV is undergoing a profound change in viewing patterns. Photograph: EPA/JOERG CARSTENSEN
TV industry is fast approaching a tipping point

I don’t have a television, which is one of those admissions that’s really hard to make without sounding insufferably smug. But rather than swearing of(...)