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.
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 ShirkyCuration comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
Clay ShirkyAmateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity
Clay ShirkyThe 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.
Clay ShirkyA firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
Clay ShirkyKnowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
Clay ShirkyMore interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built.
Clay ShirkyWhen 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 ShirkyIt is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.
Clay ShirkyThe great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.
Clay ShirkyCivic 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.
Clay ShirkyThe 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.
Clay ShirkySociety 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 ShirkyTo 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 ShirkyIndeed, 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.
Clay ShirkyThe waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.
Clay ShirkyWe 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.
Clay ShirkyHuman beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.
Clay ShirkyBureaucracies 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 ShirkyPrior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table
Clay ShirkyUnlike 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 ShirkyWe systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
Clay ShirkyWikipedia 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.
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 ShirkyOne of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
Clay ShirkyTime Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'
Clay Shirky