Clay Shirky Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Clay Shirky
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.

Clay Shirky
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.

Clay Shirky
A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.

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

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

Clay Shirky
Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

Clay Shirky
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
The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of 'comes from everyone' and 'goes everywhere.') We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won't matter much, but the norms we set will. Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change.

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

Clay Shirky
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. [...] For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. [...]

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

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

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

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

Clay Shirky
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

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

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