Clay Shirky Quotes

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

~ Clay Shirky

Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

~ Clay Shirky

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.

~ Clay Shirky

[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.

~ Clay Shirky

[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.

~ Clay Shirky

Sharing thoughts and expressions and even actions with others, possibly many others, is becoming a normal opportunity, not just for professionals and experts but for anyone who wants it. This opportunity can work on scales and over duration that were previously unimaginable. Unlike personal or communal value, public value requires not just new opportunities for old motivations; it requires governance, which is to say ways of discouraging or preventing people from wrecking either the process or the product of the group.

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.

~ Clay Shirky

How we treat one another matters, and not just in a it's nice to be nice kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.

~ Clay Shirky

Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task.

~ Clay Shirky

This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to acquire a culture that rewards their members for doing that hard work. It takes this kind of group effort to get what we need, not just what we want; understanding how to create and maintain is one of the great challenges of our era.

~ Clay Shirky

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

[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.

~ Clay Shirky

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

~ Clay Shirky

[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

~ Clay Shirky

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

~ Clay Shirky

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

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

~ Clay Shirky

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.

~ Clay Shirky

The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming 'gather, then share' into 'share, then gather'.

~ Clay Shirky

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

~ Clay Shirky

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.

~ Clay Shirky

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.

~ Clay Shirky

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