Clay Shirky > Quotes

“When we change the way we communicate, we change society”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”
― Clay Shirky

“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
― Clay Shirky

“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.”
― Clay Shirky

“[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.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“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.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

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

“Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[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.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“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.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“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.”
― Clay Shirky

“One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction...”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“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.”
― Clay Shirky

“The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.”
― Clay Shirky

“A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [...] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.”
― Clay Shirky