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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Clay Shirky

  Moving, Past, Egalitarianism

  Clay Shirky (2008). “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”, p.63, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  8 Copy quote

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

  Clay Shirky

  Imagination, Leap Of Faith, Upgrading

  8 Copy quote

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

  Clay Shirky

  Jobs, Buttons, Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  26 Copy quote

• 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.

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

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

  Clay Shirky

  Promise, Needs, Tools

  4 Copy quote

• 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?'

  Clay Shirky

  Cat, Talking, Singing

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• Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity

  Clay Shirky

  Mean, Identity, Behavior

  Clay Shirky (2008). “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”, p.71, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

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

  Clay Shirky

  Mean, Organization, Groups

  "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". Book by Clay Shirky, 2008.

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• 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.

  Clay Shirky

  Strong, Effort, Political

  4 Copy quote

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