Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
Clay Shirky
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Certain
Fame
Gets
Move
Egalitarianism
Small
Medium
Possible
Mediums
Moving
Forced
Social
Systems
Past
Size
More quotes by Clay Shirky
There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
Clay Shirky
A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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
If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
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
When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
Clay Shirky
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
Clay Shirky
We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
Clay Shirky
Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
Clay Shirky
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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 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
Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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
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
To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.
Clay Shirky
Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
Clay Shirky
Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
Clay Shirky
Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
Clay Shirky
Collaboration is not an absolute good.
Clay Shirky