About Clay Shirky: Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.
Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.
[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 loweri...
[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.
The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming 'gather, then share' into 'share, then gather'.
The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?
Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.
The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [...].
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.
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.
The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.
In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.
The transfer of [...] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal.
Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.
The web's democratic in one way and distinctly undemocratic in another way. And I think a lot of the confusion about the political ramifications have to do with that one word having so many meanings. So, it's democratic in that it quite literally del...
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 eve...
There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.
Facebook is not very good at dealing with named groups; they're not very good at saying, 'We've got this book club and I'm a member and you're not.' But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action.
Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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.
