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
technology want couches
Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'
simple credit projects
[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.
knowledge learning technology
It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.
challenges tools improvement
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
technology interesting boring
Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.
issues talent social
How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
promise tools needs
What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."
challenges done internet
The 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.
gorillas life-is social
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
successful effort gains
A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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.
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.