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Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky Books

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“Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task.”

CommunityValueNew MediaCivic ValuePublic Value
Book:Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
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“This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to acquire a culture that rewards their members for doing that hard work. It takes this kind of group effort to get what we need, not just what we want; understanding how to create and maintain is one of the great challenges of our era.”

CommunityValueNew MediaCivic ValuePublic Value
Book:Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
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“[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.”

TechnologySocietyInternetOrganization
Book:Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
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“The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real.”

ProductivityGroup DynamicsClay Shirky
Book:Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
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“The simplest answer is that the user had access to reality—every company builds a bubble around itself, where the products get built and tested in a more controlled environment than they get used in. This is especially true of complex software. What the early users enabled Xiaomi to see was how MIUI actually worked when real (albeit unusually technically proficient) people tried to install it on a wide variety of devices.”

User Experience2015Software TestingUser Testing
Book:Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream
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“For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation.”

Has BeensWantedPoliticalDesirePoliticsStrongCan DoEffortGroupsModernTalentHavensLimitsStructureOperationsComplexityModern LifeGroup Effort
Author:Clay Shirky
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“What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.”

ThinkingWayTwoBigsSeemsFormValuesCultureTechnologyInformationAmountRegardStrategyMarketingCurrentsDisasterDataLabelsLinksSurprisingSchemesUnitsRecipesMessyConstraintsTagLabelingCategorization
Author:Clay Shirky
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