Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Clay Shirky

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way.

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

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

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.

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.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

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

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

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

[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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Curation comes up when search stops working.

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.

A revolution doesn’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... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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