Clay Shirky

Curation comes up when search stops working,

— Clay Shirky

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

— Clay Shirky

It's not a revolution if nobody loses

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

— Clay Shirky

There is no news industry.

— 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

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

— Clay Shirky

“The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.”

— Clay Shirky

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

— 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

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

— Clay Shirky

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

— 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…

— 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…

— 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

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

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

When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you…

— Clay Shirky

“For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state,…

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and one we…

— Clay Shirky

To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the…

— 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…

— Clay Shirky

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think…

— 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…

— Clay Shirky

Think about spam filters; if email didnt come from someone that someone you know knows, thats an important signal, and one we…

— 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…

— 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…

— Clay Shirky

“The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a…

— Clay Shirky

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on…

— Clay Shirky

“This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population…

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

“the only test any book should ever have to pass is whether the reader likes it”

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

— Clay Shirky