Clay Shirky Quotes - Page 4

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

[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.