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

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

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.

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.

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

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

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.

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

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

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?'

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

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

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

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

There is no news industry.

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

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