Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from โsave newspapersโ to โsave societyโ, the imperative changes from โpreserve the current institutionsโ to โdo whatever works.โ And what works today isnโt the same as what used to work.
Clay ShirkyIf itโs a revolution it canโt be predictable. And if itโs predictable it canโt be a revolution.
Clay ShirkyThere 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 ShirkyCommunications 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.
Clay ShirkyPublishing 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.
Clay ShirkyWhat 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.
Clay Shirky