About Clay Shirky: Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.
The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.
Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just don't. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.
I certainly never intended for myself an academic career and, were the academy to suffer, I'd just go do something else. I don't have a commitment to it or to really, frankly, almost any institution that assumes that it has to be stable forever.
Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.
More interesting than thinking about what's possible in 10 years is thinking what's possible now but that no one has built.
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 used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.
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 ...
One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we've just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities - London, New York, and Los Angeles - aro...
I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed.
The difference between what all the people can do individually and the global consumption of nonrenewable resources is huge. The tension is... what will it take to get people to act in concert? There isn't any additive solution to the problem. It wil...
Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation.
Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.
People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.
Sharing thoughts and expressions and even actions with others, possibly many others, is becoming a normal opportunity, not just for professionals and experts but for anyone who wants it. This opportunity can work on scales and over duration that were...
Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate...
I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of histor...
It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.
How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
