Clay Shirky

How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.

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

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

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.

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.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.

A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors

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.

Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity

Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?

It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.

We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.