How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the challenges of having access to abundant information and expression, suggesting that too much can lead to disorder.
Clay Shirky's quote highlights the paradox of our modern age where the overwhelming availability of information and expressive tools may lead to confusion and dilution of meaning. In contrast to past generations that operated under scarcity, we now face the complication of navigating through a sea of abundance, which can hinder communication and understanding rather than facilitate it.
Themes
AbundanceExpressionInformationScarcityGeneration
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about modern media's impact on society.
More from Clay Shirky
All quotes βCuration comes up when people realize that it isnβt just about information seeking, itβs also about synchronizing a community.
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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.
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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.
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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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