Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky
Clay Shirkyis an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
Clay Shirky quotes about
cat talking singing
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?'
attention imbalance fame
Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
information characteristics humans
Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
why-not internet mass
The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?
done world littles
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.
moving collaboration cooperation
We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
self giving pages
[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.
thinking feelings
We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
law burden process
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.
jobs algorithms flaws
Algorithms dont do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
thinking important world
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.
causes social cause-and-effect
Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.
thinking years interesting
More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built.
gorillas life-is social
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.