167 Quotes by Clay Shirky

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

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

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

[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.

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.

[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.

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.

[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.