Clay Shirky
How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.Collection: Issues
Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.Collection: Weekend
Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.Collection: Moving
Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.Collection: Motivation
Collaboration is not an absolute good.Collection: Collaboration
Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.Collection: Interesting
A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.Collection: Successful
There are three things you need to be a good writer: you need to read a lot, you need to write a lot, and you need a lot of feedback.Collection: Writing
The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.Collection: Party
It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.Collection: Computer
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.Collection: Age
Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.Collection: Jobs
Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Attention
The threat [of the U.S. bills SOPA and PIPA] is the inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.Collection: Burden Of Proof
What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.Collection: Technology
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?'Collection: Cat
The great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.Collection: Media
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.Collection: Data
Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identityCollection: Mean
For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Wish
What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."Collection: Promise
The loss of control you fear is already in the past.Collection: Loss
[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.Collection: Self
In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.Collection: Members
Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.Collection: Groups
There is no news industry.Collection: News
Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.Collection: Attention
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.Collection: Challenges
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.Collection: Thinking
Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.Collection: Cities
Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.Collection: People
We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.Collection: Mean
Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate.Collection: People
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.Collection: Tools
Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.Collection: Wikipedia
Think about spam filters; if email didnt come from someone that someone you know knows, thats an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just dont. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.Collection: Thinking
A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.Collection: Wikipedia
We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.Collection: Moving
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.Collection: Gorillas