How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The Internet has both positive and negative impacts on society, and recognizing this duality is essential to understanding its overall influence.
Clay Shirky's quote highlights the complexity of the Internet's role in society, suggesting that while it brings numerous benefits, it also has significant drawbacks that cannot be overlooked. This acknowledgment of the negative consequences implies that real change or 'revolution' inevitably comes with losses, making it crucial to approach the topic with a balanced perspective rather than seeing it in purely favorable or unfavorable terms.
Themes
InternetSocietyImpactPositivityNegativityChange
In practice
Example use cases
During a discussion on social media, this quote can be used to remind participants that while there are benefits, there are also risks associated with online platforms.
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
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
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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