The Atlantic printed an interesting interview with Clay Shirky, covering a wide range of topics like privacy, publishing, and the Internet as a distractor. Shirky argues for tempered pessimism about the oft-lamented distracting role of the Internet. Here’s why:

The other case for tempered pessimism is that the examples we have of group creation don’t rely on wholesale change — whether you are looking at examples of amateur collaboration (digitizing old ship logs, figuring out how proteins fold), sites of cultural production (Pinterest, YouTube), collaborative consumption (Freecycle, CouchSurfing) or new kinds of conversational value (Quora, Reddit). Each of these initiatives requires only a small percentage of the population to donate a small percentage of time to making or sharing to have an outsized effect.

This is, for me, the biggest driving force in our use of the cognitive surplus: considering that by the end of the 20th century, the total time spent in media consumption, with no accompanying production or sharing and even precious little annotation or discussion, is a situation so different from ours in the early 21st century.

His point is that even though we’re much more connected to media (which definitely has its drawbacks), it’s a much less passive connection than it used to be. Now we comment, like, share, and in the best case scenario, further discussions in a meaningful way. And that’s a good thing.