Communications 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 Shirky More Quotes by Clay Shirky More Quotes From Clay Shirky The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something. Clay Shirky doing-nothing gaps real The transfer of [...] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal. Clay Shirky transfers capability class Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation. Clay Shirky unending wikipedia collectivism 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. Clay Shirky email important thinking More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built. Clay Shirky years interesting thinking It's not a revolution if nobody loses Clay Shirky loses revolution ifs 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?' Clay Shirky singing cat talking We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing. Clay Shirky groups organization mean 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. Clay Shirky data technology thinking [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 pages self giving Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws. Clay Shirky algorithms flaws jobs There is a giant gulf between doing something and doing nothing. And someone who makes a lolcat and uploads it - even if only to crack their friends up - has already crossed that chasm to doing something. That's the sea change, and you can see it even with the cute cats. Clay Shirky you change sea cute I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. Clay Shirky me internet brain science Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation. Clay Shirky changes pollution important energy When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way. Clay Shirky say new editing way Facebook is not very good at dealing with named groups; they're not very good at saying, 'We've got this book club and I'm a member and you're not.' But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action. Clay Shirky good you action book I certainly never intended for myself an academic career and, were the academy to suffer, I'd just go do something else. I don't have a commitment to it or to really, frankly, almost any institution that assumes that it has to be stable forever. Clay Shirky never go myself commitment Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem. Clay Shirky just journalism problem fun Growing up with a name that rhymes with turkey - and jerky - was no great fun. But, as an adult, I tell you, being globally unique in the age of Google can be extremely helpful. Clay Shirky name great you age I removed 'cyberspace' from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise. Clay Shirky place real students world
![Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unendin... by Clay Shirky](https://whatsmyquote.com/images/quote-medium-quote-7affb05ea00e46baaa8064e5e800aee4.jpg)
