Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations Quotes

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

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.

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

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

[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.

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

Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.