Clay Shirky quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Clay Shirky on Wise Famous Quotes.

The Facebook of China, however, is Renren, launched in 2005. (The Google of China is Baidu, and the Twitter of China is Sina Weibo.)

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

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.

When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'

Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.

We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.

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

A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.

Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table

Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.

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

We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.

Wikipedia [ ... ] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

The only test any book should ever have to pass is whether the reader likes it

How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.

Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.

When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.

Social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone

The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [ ... ].

The Dean campaign had accidentally created a movement for a passionate few rather than a vote-getting operation.

Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.

We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

multitude of books is a great evil

One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.

We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

The transfer of [ ... ] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [ ... ] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.

Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.

The great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

A revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors

Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.

Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.

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

If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.

There are three things you need to be a good writer: you need to read a lot, you need to write a lot, and you need a lot of feedback.

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.

It's not information overload. It's filter failure.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Using the market to gradually fix a totalitarian government is like making a pot of tea by running a volcano through a glacier.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution

Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming 'gather, then share' into 'share, then gather'.

More interesting than thinking about what's possible in 10 years is thinking what's possible now but that no one has built.

What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.

[R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.

One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction ...

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed.

Curation comes up when search stops working,

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

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

[F]or any group determined to maintain a set of communal standards some mechanism of enforcement must exist.

The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody

There is no news industry.

Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.

[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.

The loss of control you fear is already in the past.

If it's a revolution it can't be predictable. And if it's predictable it can't be a revolution.

Curation comes up when people realize that it isn't just about information seeking, it's also about synchronizing a community.