Here Comes Everybody Quotes

“When we change the way we communicate, we change society”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[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, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“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, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“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, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“The transfer of [...] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [...] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[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, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[F]or any group determined to maintain a set of communal standards some mechanism of enforcement must exist.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Collaboration is not an absolute good.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“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, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“[R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations