Clay Shirky Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

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

  Clay Shirky

  Issues, Talent, Social

  Clay Shirky (2010). “Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators”, p.23, Penguin

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

  Clay Shirky

  Class, Capability, Transfers

  Clay Shirky (2009). “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together”, p.21, Penguin UK

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Weekend, Years, Ideas

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

  Clay Shirky

  Average, Law, Definitions

  Clay Shirky (2009). “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together”, p.114, Penguin UK

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Historical, Expansion, Generations

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

  Clay Shirky

  Way, Behave, Knows

  4 Copy quote

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

  Clay Shirky

  Interesting, Tools

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

  Clay Shirky

  Successful, Effort, Cost

  Clay Shirky (2009). “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together”, p.32, Penguin UK

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• Collaboration is not an absolute good.

  Clay Shirky

  Collaboration, Absolutes

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Writing, Three, Needs

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Computer, Used, Security

  6 Copy quote

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

  Clay Shirky

  Age, Citizens, World

  "Why SOPA is a bad idea". TED Talk, www.ted.com. January 2012.

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

  Clay Shirky

  Imagination, Leap Of Faith, Upgrading

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

  Clay Shirky

  Jobs, Buttons, Publishing

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Attention, Today, Needs

  "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" by Clay Shirky, www.shirky.com. March 13, 2009.

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Burden Of Proof, Bills, Thieves

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

  Clay Shirky

  Groups, Individual, Members

  Clay Shirky (2009). “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together”, p.19, Penguin UK

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Thinking, Important, Email

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• A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

  Clay Shirky

  Wikipedia, Process, Articles

  Clay Shirky (2009). “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together”, p.107, Penguin UK

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Technology, Thinking, Data

  "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags". shirky.com. Spring, 2005.

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

  Clay Shirky

  Gorillas, Life Is, Social

  Clay Shirky (2009). “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together”, p.19, Penguin UK

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• 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

  Tools, Use, Bees

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

  Clay Shirky

  Members, Profession

  Clay Shirky (2009). “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together”, p.54, Penguin UK

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• 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

  People, Groups, Want

  Clay Shirky (2010). “Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators”, p.108, Penguin

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• With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

  Clay Shirky

  Data, Digital, Problem

  "Clay Shirky analyzes the newspaper Holocaust" by Bruce Sterling, www.wired.com. March 14, 2009.

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