Clay Shirky Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Curation comes up when search stops working.

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

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

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

It's not a revolution if nobody loses

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

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.

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

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

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

The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

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

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.

Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.

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.

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

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