Clay Shirky quotes:

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'

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.

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

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

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 at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.

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.

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

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.

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.

Think about spam filters; if email didnt come from someone that someone you know knows, thats an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just dont. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.

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

Algorithms dont do a good job of detecting their own flaws.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society.

The difference between what all the people can do individually and the global consumption of nonrenewable resources is huge. The tension is... what will it take to get people to act in concert? There isn't any additive solution to the problem. It will be both governmental and social because that's the scale of the problem.

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.

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.

If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.

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

Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

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

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

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.

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

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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.

Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation.

Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just don't. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.

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

How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution

A revolution doesnâ??t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors

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

[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.

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

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.

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

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

The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.

Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

[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.

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

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

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

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

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

More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built.

To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.

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

There is no news industry.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 thing with the singing cats?'

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

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.

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.

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

Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of â??consumerâ?? is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity

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

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

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

It's not a revolution if nobody loses

Curation comes up when search stops working,

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

We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.

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 be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.