Quotes by 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.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

[T]he category of consumer is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

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

Civic participants dont aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate...

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

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

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become groups for pairing off, in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats arent real.

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

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

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

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

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

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.

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.