Clay Shirky

It's not a revolution if nobody loses

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

— Clay Shirky

Curation comes up when search stops working,

— Clay Shirky

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

— Clay Shirky

There is no news industry.

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

— 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

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

I removed 'cyberspace' from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real…

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune…

— Clay Shirky

Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.

— 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…

— Clay Shirky

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

— 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

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

— Clay Shirky

“Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by…

— Clay Shirky

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and…

— 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

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

[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

“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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Clay Shirky

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

— 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

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky