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
historical generations scarcity
It 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.
weekend creating years
Wikipedia 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.
burden-of-proof bills thieves
The 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.
cities dating mets
Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
technology thinking data
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.
technology media long
The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.
used used-to-be security
It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.
done world littles
We 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.
wikipedia unending collectivism
Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
wikipedia process articles
A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
identity groups cooperating
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
average law definitions
Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
our-society prevention reactions
One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction...
thinking feelings
We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.