167 Quotes by Clay Shirky

Publishing isn’t a job anymore. It’s a button.

The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ into ‘share, then gather’.

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. ‘I’ll call you when I get there.’

How we treat one another matters, and not just in a “it’s nice to be nice” kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.

It’s not a revolution if nobody loses.

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group.

Until recently, ‘the news’ has meant to different things – events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.

Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn’t clarify the meaning, it destroys it.