Clay Shirky People Quotations

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.

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.

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...

If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.

Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.

Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

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.