Clay Shirky Quotations

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.

Algorithms dont do a good job of detecting their own flaws.

Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation.

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.

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

You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.

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.

One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we've just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities - London, New York, and Los Angeles - around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media.

The whole, 'Is the Internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.

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.

Facebook is not very good at dealing with named groups; they're not very good at saying, 'We've got this book club and I'm a member and you're not.' But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action.

Growing up with a name that rhymes with turkey - and jerky - was no great fun. But, as an adult, I tell you, being globally unique in the age of Google can be extremely helpful.

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

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

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.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society.

I certainly never intended for myself an academic career and, were the academy to suffer, I'd just go do something else. I don't have a commitment to it or to really, frankly, almost any institution that assumes that it has to be stable forever.

The web's democratic in one way and distinctly undemocratic in another way. And I think a lot of the confusion about the political ramifications have to do with that one word having so many meanings. So, it's democratic in that it quite literally delivers power to the people; it, it essentially opens up participation in the public's mind.

There is a giant gulf between doing something and doing nothing. And someone who makes a lolcat and uploads it - even if only to crack their friends up - has already crossed that chasm to doing something. That's the sea change, and you can see it even with the cute cats.

Think about spam filters; if email didnt come from someone that someone you know knows, thats an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just dont. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.

When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way.

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

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

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

I removed 'cyberspace' from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise.

You know you've got a good piece of software when people use it for purposes for which the designers never intended or designed for.

We demonstrated the exchange of clinical information, by using a critical set of common, open technical standards.

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

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

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

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.

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

The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

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...

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

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

For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

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

Curation comes up when search stops working,

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

There is no news industry.

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

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.

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

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

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

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

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

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.

The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

It's not a revolution if nobody loses

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

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

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?'

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

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

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

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.

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

[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.

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

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.

More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats 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."

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

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

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word "publishing" means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says "publish," and when you press it, it's done.

To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

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