We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online. Clay Shirky Read Quote
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social. Clay Shirky Read Quote
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 historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. Clay Shirky Read Quote
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 will be both governmental and social because that’s the scale of the problem. Clay Shirky Read Quote
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. Clay Shirky Read Quote
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 delivers power to the people; it, it essentially opens up participation in the public’s mind. Clay Shirky Read Quote
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 – around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media. Clay Shirky Read Quote
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. Clay Shirky Read Quote
More interesting than thinking about what’s possible in 10 years is thinking what’s possible now but that no one has built. Clay Shirky Read Quote
Growing up with a name that rhymes with turkey – and jerky – was no great fun. But, as an adult, I tell you, being globally unique in the age of Google can be extremely helpful. Clay Shirky Read Quote
