Clay Shirky Quotes

Things That Can’t Last Don’t. The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.

The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.

The government has recognized that WikiLeaks is not an event — it is a capability — and anybody who can get material out of a classified system can now publish it worldwide in a way that can't be redacted or removed. The idea of a widely shared but secure secret is over.

There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.

What was once a sharp break between two styles of communicating is becoming a smooth transition….The distinction between broadcast and communications, which is to say one-to-many and one-to-one tools, used to be so clear that we could distinguish between a personal and impersonal message just by the type of medium used.

The genius of wikis, and the coming change in group effort in general, is in part predicated on the ability to make nonfinancial motivations add up to something of global significance.

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.