Best 87 quotes of Clay Shirky on MyQuotes

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

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation.

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word "publishing" means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says "publish," and when you press it, it's done.

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

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

Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

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

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.

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

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

The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.

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

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

The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

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.

There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.

There is no news industry.

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

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

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.

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.