Clay Shirky Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

It's not a revolution if nobody loses

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.

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

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

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

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.

Curation comes up when search stops working.

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

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

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

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

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.

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

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

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

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.

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

[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.

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.

How we treat one another matters, and not just in a "it's nice to be nice" kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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