Clay Shirky: Productivity

Clay Shirky is American technology writer. Explore interesting quotes on productivity.

Clay Shirky: 38 quotes0 likes

“Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.”

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 139-140

“Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. The aggregate relations among individuals and groups, among individuals within groups, and among groups forms a network of astonishing complexity.”

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 14

“TV is unbalanced—if I own a TV station, and you own a television, I can speak to you, but you can’t speak to me. Phones, by contrast, are balanced; if you buy the means of consumption, you automatically own the means of production. When you purchase a phone, no one asks if you just want to listen, or if you want to talk on it too. Participation is inherent in the phone, and it’s the same for the computer. When you buy a machine that lets you consume digital content, you also buy a machine to produce it. Further, you can share material with your friends, and you can talk about what you consumed or produced or shared. These aren’t additional features; they are part of the basic package.”

Cognitive Surplus : Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

“At every turn, skeptical observers have attacked the idea that pooling our cognitive surplus could work to create anything worthwhile, or suggested that if it does work, it is a kind of cheating, because sharing at a scale that competes with older institutions is somehow wrong. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft denounced the shared production of software as communism. Robert McHenry, a former editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, likened Wikipedia to a public rest room. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested though they were, echoed more broadly held beliefs. Shared, unmanaged effort might be fine for picnics and bowling leagues, but serious work is done for money, by people who work in proper organizations, with managers directing their work.”

Cognitive Surplus : Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

“Social production is not a panacea; it is just an alternative. Although we are better off being able to use it when it is valuable, it brings its own challenges, just as production via firms and governments does. Even the simplest pooled effort or voluntary participation can be fraught with tension among the individual participants, and between those individuals and the group. Like many aspects of social life, this problem has no solution; the dilemma can be addressed only by various compromises, none of them wholly satisfactory. One way to help a group of participants improve their ability to function together is the creation and maintenance of shared culture.”

Cognitive Surplus : Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

“Xiaomi, founded in Beijing in 2010 by Lei Jun, a computer scientist and charismatic serial entrepreneur now in his mid-forties, has accomplished a lot in half a decade. Even just looking at its sales figures, the superlatives pile up. In its short life, it has gone from a startup focused on making a new mobile phone interface to beating Samsung as the number one phone vendor in the largest market in the world in 2014. Its products are so popular in China that it has become the third largest ecommerce firm there just selling its own products, after the general marketplace sites Alibaba and JD. com, and ahead of Amazon. cn.”

Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream (2015)