CSClay Shirky

34 collected words

Clay Shirky

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

Clay Shirky / quote

02Undated

Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

Clay Shirky / quote

03Undated

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.

Clay Shirky / quote

04Undated

[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.

Clay Shirky / quote

05Undated

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

Clay Shirky / quote

06Undated

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.

Clay Shirky / quote

07Undated

[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.

Clay Shirky / quote

08Undated

[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.

Clay Shirky / quote

09Undated

Sharing thoughts and expressions and even actions with others, possibly many others, is becoming a normal opportunity, not just for professionals and experts but for anyone who wants it. This opportunity can work on scales and over duration that were previously unimaginable. Unlike personal or communal value, public value requires not just new opportunities for old motivations; it requires governance, which is to say ways of discouraging or preventing people from wrecking either the process or the product of the group.

Clay Shirky / quote

10Undated

Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.

Clay Shirky / quote

11Undated

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.

Clay Shirky / quote

12Undated

How we treat one another matters, and not just in a "it's nice to be nice" kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.

Clay Shirky / quote

13Undated

Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task.

Clay Shirky / quote

14Undated

This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to acquire a culture that rewards their members for doing that hard work. It takes this kind of group effort to get what we need, not just what we want; understanding how to create and maintain is one of the great challenges of our era.

Clay Shirky / quote

15Undated

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

Clay Shirky / quote

16Undated

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

Clay Shirky / quote

17Undated

[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 Shirky / quote

18Undated

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

Clay Shirky / quote

19Undated

[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

Clay Shirky / quote

20Undated

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

Clay Shirky / quote

21Undated

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...

Clay Shirky / quote

22Undated

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.

Clay Shirky / quote

23Undated

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Clay Shirky / quote

24Undated

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real.

Clay Shirky / quote