Quotes from Clay Shirky

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate.

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just don't. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.

Facebook is not very good at dealing with named groups; they're not very good at saying, 'We've got this book club and I'm a member and you're not.' But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action.

Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.

Growing up with a name that rhymes with turkey - and jerky - was no great fun. But, as an adult, I tell you, being globally unique in the age of Google can be extremely helpful.

Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation.

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.

What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."

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

I removed 'cyberspace' from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise.

It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.

There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.