Clay Shirky Quotes

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate.

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

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

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

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

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

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

It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

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

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 have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.

Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems.

Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.

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

When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?'

If it’s a revolution it can’t be predictable.

And if it’s predictable it can’t be a revolution.

The threat [of the U.S. bills SOPA and PIPA] is the inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.

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.

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

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

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

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

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

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

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

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.

It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.

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

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

There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment.

The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.

Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity

Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.

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

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

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

Curation comes up when search stops working.

There is no news industry.

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.

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

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

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

The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

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