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.Collection: Environmental
When we change the way we communicate, we change society.Collection: Society
Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'Collection: Motivation
We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.Collection: Information
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.Collection: Creativity
A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviorsCollection: Tools
It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.Collection: Knowledge
Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.Collection: Jobs
The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.Collection: Middle
Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.Collection: Communication
If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.Collection: People
We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.Collection: Thinking
One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction.Collection: Prevention
It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.Collection: Past
The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.Collection: Principles
Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the tableCollection: Real
[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.Collection: Simple
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.Collection: Funny
There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.Collection: Filters
More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built.Collection: Thinking
Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.Collection: Causes
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.Collection: Identity
The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.Collection: Agreement
When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.Collection: Philosophy
It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.Collection: Motivation
The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.Collection: Technology
The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.Collection: Mean
When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'Collection: Phones
The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?Collection: Why Not
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.Collection: Needs
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.Collection: Challenges
Curation comes up when search stops working.Collection: Come Up
If it’s a revolution it can’t be predictable. And if it’s predictable it can’t be a revolution.Collection: Revolution
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.Collection: Law
If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.Collection: Hands
Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.Collection: Technology
Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.Collection: Communication
It's not a revolution if nobody losesCollection: Revolution
Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.Collection: Inspiration
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word "publishing" means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says "publish," and when you press it, it's done.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Thinking
Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.Collection: Information
The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.Collection: Real
Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.Collection: Years
Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.Collection: Powerful
We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.Collection: Wikipedia
One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.Collection: Way
The transfer of [...] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal.Collection: Class
Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.Collection: Trying
Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.Collection: Average