167 Quotes by Clay Shirky

There is a giant gulf between doing something and doing nothing. And someone who makes a lolcat and uploads it - even if only to crack their friends up - has already crossed that chasm to doing something. That's the sea change, and you can see it even with the cute cats.

Think about spam filters; if email didnt come from someone that someone you know knows, thats an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just dont. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.

When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way.

How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.

I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed.

Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.

I removed 'cyberspace' from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise.

You know you've got a good piece of software when people use it for purposes for which the designers never intended or designed for.

We demonstrated the exchange of clinical information, by using a critical set of common, open technical standards.