Clay Shirky Thinking Quotations

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.

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.

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.

More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built.

Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.

It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.