Clay Shirky Technology Quotations

Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.

Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table

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.

The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.