Quotes From "Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations" By Clay Shirky

When we change the way we communicate, we change society Clay Shirky

Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome. Clay Shirky

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion. Clay Shirky

[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming. Clay Shirky

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity. Clay Shirky

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public. Clay Shirky

[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action. Clay Shirky

[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act. Clay Shirky

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

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public. Clay Shirky

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention. Clay Shirky

[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity. Clay Shirky

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. Clay Shirky

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group. Clay Shirky

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse. Clay Shirky

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not? Clay Shirky

Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press. Clay Shirky

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it. Clay Shirky

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product. Clay Shirky

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process. Clay Shirky

The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming 'gather, then share' into 'share, then gather'. Clay Shirky

One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction... Clay Shirky