Clay Shirky Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?'

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.

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

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

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

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

There is no news industry.

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

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

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

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.

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