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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
Clay Shirky
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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
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More quotes by Clay Shirky
If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Clay Shirky
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky
Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
Clay Shirky
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
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.
Clay Shirky
Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
Clay Shirky
There is no news industry.
Clay Shirky
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
Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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
The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
Clay Shirky
Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
Clay Shirky
Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
Clay Shirky
We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
Clay Shirky
When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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
When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
Clay Shirky
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
Clay Shirky
Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
Clay Shirky