How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
Clay ShirkyRead
Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Curation is not only about gathering information but also about fostering community connections.
In this quote, Clay Shirky emphasizes the dual role of curation in the modern information age. It highlights that effective curation goes beyond simply collecting or sharing information; it also involves creating a sense of community among individuals who are seeking, sharing, and engaging with that information, thereby synchronizing their interests and interactions in meaningful ways.
Themes
CurationCommunityInformationSynchronization
In practice
Example use cases
During a community event, a speaker could use this quote to emphasize the importance of collaboration.
More from Clay Shirky
All quotes →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.
Clay ShirkyRead
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.
Clay ShirkyRead
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.
Clay ShirkyRead
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.
Clay ShirkyRead
If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Clay ShirkyRead
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