Shirky Quotes & Sayings

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 ... — Clay Shirky

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

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

If it's a revolution it can't be predictable. And if it's predictable it can't be a revolution. — Clay Shirky

It's not information overload. It's filter failure. — Clay Shirky

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. — Clay Shirky

The Facebook of China, however, is Renren, launched in 2005. (The Google of China is Baidu, and the Twitter of China is Sina Weibo.) — Clay Shirky

More interesting than thinking about what's possible in 10 years is thinking what's possible now but that no one has built. — Clay Shirky

The web's democratic in one way and distinctly undemocratic in another way. And I think a lot of the confusion about the political ramifications have to do with that one word having so many meanings. So, it's democratic in that it quite literally delivers power to the people; it, it essentially opens up participation in the public's mind. — Clay Shirky

We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast. — Clay Shirky

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

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 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. — Clay Shirky

Digital networks are increasing the fluidity of all media. The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public. — Clay Shirky

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. — Clay Shirky

I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed. — Clay Shirky

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. — Clay Shirky

There is a giant gulf between doing something and doing nothing. And someone who makes a lolcat and uploads it - even if only to crack their friends up - has already crossed that chasm to doing something. That's the sea change, and you can see it even with the cute cats. — Clay Shirky

One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we've just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities - London, New York, and Los Angeles - around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media. — Clay Shirky

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action. — Clay Shirky

Collaboration is not an absolute good. — Clay Shirky

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

Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift
to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life. — Nicholas Carr

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

[R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation. — Clay Shirky

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

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

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. — Clay Shirky

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

The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [ ... ]. — Clay Shirky

I certainly never intended for myself an academic career and, were the academy to suffer, I'd just go do something else. I don't have a commitment to it or to really, frankly, almost any institution that assumes that it has to be stable forever. — Clay Shirky

Facebook is not very good at dealing with named groups; they're not very good at saying, 'We've got this book club and I'm a member and you're not.' But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action. — Clay Shirky

Social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone — Clay Shirky

The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody — Clay Shirky

You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public. — Clay Shirky

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

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

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. — Clay Shirky

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

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

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. — Clay Shirky

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem. — Clay Shirky

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. — Clay Shirky

Using the market to gradually fix a totalitarian government is like making a pot of tea by running a volcano through a glacier. — Clay Shirky

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

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

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. — Clay Shirky

Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [ ... ] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups. — Clay Shirky

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

Makery-ness in the U.S. comes as part of a complex of oppositional attitudes toward mainstream culture that is more about social signaling than unvarnished commitment to DIY. The Maker Movement involves ostentatiously DIY products, designed and assembled against a background of nostalgia for the old U.S. manufacturing industry, often produced in small batches for connoisseurs of the handmade, created as a form of conspicuous production. Meanwhile, — Clay Shirky

An organization will tend to grow only when the advantages that can be gotten from directing the work of additional employees are less than the transaction costs of managing them. — Clay Shirky

When we change the way we communicate, we change society — Clay Shirky

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it. — Clay Shirky

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

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. — Clay Shirky

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. — Clay Shirky

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

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

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. — Clay Shirky

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

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. — Clay Shirky

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product. — Clay Shirky

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. — Clay Shirky

For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. — Clay Shirky

[F]or any group determined to maintain a set of communal standards some mechanism of enforcement must exist. — Clay Shirky

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

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. — Clay Shirky

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. — Clay Shirky

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

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

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

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other. — Clay Shirky

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

When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool. — Clay Shirky

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

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity. — Clay Shirky

When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way. — Clay Shirky

The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional. — Clay Shirky

Growing up with a name that rhymes with turkey - and jerky - was no great fun. But, as an adult, I tell you, being globally unique in the age of Google can be extremely helpful. — Clay Shirky

I removed 'cyberspace' from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise. — Clay Shirky

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

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

Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task. — Clay Shirky

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

A revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors — 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

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

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

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. — Clay Shirky

There is no news industry. — Clay Shirky

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution — Clay Shirky

The Dean campaign had accidentally created a movement for a passionate few rather than a vote-getting operation. — Clay Shirky

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

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

As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. — Clay Shirky

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real. — Clay Shirky

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

[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

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