Clay Shirky Quotes

78 quotes in 983 categories

• Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say,…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -…
• Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.
• It's not a revolution if nobody loses
• Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
• Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
• 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,…
• We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
• It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. ...…
• When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the…
• We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
• 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…
• The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.
• Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table
• We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
• Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
• Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.

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