Quote

If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.

Clay Shirky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Like
Smoke
Pick
Picks
Second
Hand
Hands
Someone
Multitasking
Around
Distraction

More quotes by Clay Shirky

Image
The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
Clay Shirky
Image
One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
Clay Shirky
Image
The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
Clay Shirky
Image
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
Image
Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
Clay Shirky
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Clay Shirky
Image
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
Image
Collaboration is not an absolute good.
Clay Shirky
Image
Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
Clay Shirky
Image
Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
Clay Shirky
Image
[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
Image
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
Clay Shirky
Image
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
Clay Shirky
Image
Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
Clay Shirky
Image
Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Clay Shirky
Image
A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
Clay Shirky
Image
There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
Clay Shirky
Image
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