How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote discusses the evolution of information organization through organic methods like tagging, emphasizing the value found in messy data sets.
In this quote, Clay Shirky reflects on the future of organizing information, moving away from rigid categorization to a more fluid and organic method centered around links and tags. He suggests that while free-form tagging may seem chaotic and prone to failure, it has the potential to uncover valuable insights from complex data, as demonstrated by the workings of the Web, which thrives on the richness and unpredictability of user-generated content.
Themes
InformationOrganizationTaggingDataWeb
In practice
Example use cases
In a tech conference discussing the future of data management.
More from Clay Shirky
All quotes →Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
Clay ShirkyRead
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
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
Similar quotes
Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.
Jensen HuangRead
The Model T blazed the way for the motor industry & started the movement for good roads everywhere. It is still the pioneer car in many parts of the world which are just beginning to be motorized.
Henry FordRead
I've been to so many manufacturing plants. I've yet to walk into one where I did not think AI solutions wouldn't help.
Andrew NgRead
The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.
Clive ThompsonRead
Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
Terence MckennaRead