Clay Shirky: Use

“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.”

Clay Shirky

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

People , Support , Time , Reading

“Then there are the phones designed for East Asian sensibilities. The same region that brought us the selfie stick also brought us Oppo, a company whose phone’s principal selling points include a high-quality camera and custom software that automatically airbrushes photos with faces in them. The ad campaigns emphasize a particularly performative form of femininity, since, in a nice touch, the software makes a guess about the gender of the subject—everyone gets smoother skin, but only the ladies get their lips reddened. Despite successful rollouts in Thailand and Korea, Oppo has not made much of a dent in markets outside East Asia. Their U. S. launch was a bust.”

Clay Shirky

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

Photo , Success

“The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of 'comes from everyone' and 'goes everywhere.') We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won't matter much, but the norms we set will. Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change.”

Clay Shirky

"The Shock of Inclusion" http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_1.html#shirky, in The Edge Annual Question — 2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html, January 2010

Fate , People , Education , School

“Despite the firewall, Chinese companies continue to advertise themselves on Facebook and Google—my dentist in Shanghai puts his Gmail address in scrolling LEDs in front of his practice. To do business with the rest of the world, Chinese firms increasingly have to get good at using services that are both essential and (theoretically) unavailable.”

Clay Shirky

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

World , Business

“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.”

Clay Shirky

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

Life , Way , Problem , Effort

“[an Ontario-based bus company] Trentway-Wagar was arguing that because carpooling used to be inconvenient, it should always be inconvenient, and if that inconvenience disappeared, then it should be reinserted by legal fiat. Curiously, an organization that commits to helping society manage a problem also commits itself to the preservation of that same problem, as its institutional existence hinges on society’s continued need for its management. Bus companies provide a critical service—public transportation—but they also commit themselves, as Trentway-Wagar did, to fending off competition from alternative ways of moving people from one place to another.”

Clay Shirky

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

People , Way , Problem , Help

“We use the word "organization" to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing… We use one word for both because, at a certain scale, we haven't been able to get organization without organizations; the former seems to imply the latter.”

Clay Shirky

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 29