167 Quotes by Clay Shirky

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.

Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

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.

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.