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
hands multitasking distraction
If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
revolution loses ifs
It's not a revolution if nobody loses
technology interesting boring
Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.
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?'
philosophy tools management
When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
trying way fuzzy
Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
needs journalism newspapers
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
powerful believe thinking
Indeed, 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.
way behave ifs
One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
data digital problem
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
issues talent social
How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
attention today needs
Society 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.
people way pay
If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
party waterfalls method
The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.