Clay Shirky Quotes

The evolution of technology is, like the evolution of literature, heavily path-dependent. Culture plays a far more important role in the acceptance, adoption, and spread of technology than many of us are willing to acknowledge.

Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description.

Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

All forms of contact are good: letters, parcels, e-mails - I've been trying to get a Webcam for my computer, but I'm such a Luddite.

Because of technology, we don't develop telepathy. We don't use telepathy, but use, you know, the mobile phones. Why?

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.

'The Victorian Internet' is a must read for anyone interested in the history of technology and in the cycles of hype, boom, and bust that seem to only quicken with each new wave of innovation. Highly recommended.

Technology has become our culture

No particular technology lasts for long.

A society without civil, political, and property rights may indeed find it difficult to innovate innovation outside the military sector, but it often has a relatively easy time adopting technologies that have already been developed elsewhere.

Technology is always ahead of the law.

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

We didn't even have email when I was in college.

Engineers and entrepreneurs are fundamentally dissatisfied with the way the world is and want to make it better. There are so many things you could do with technology if you can match it up with real problems.

Technology is the future, I have seen the third industrial revolution, and we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution.

I truly hope that we can evolve with technology, and use it for the benefit of all mankind, but history might suggest otherwise.

Every time there is a major shift in technology, it's been hugely exciting and scary at the same time. I have seen some really drastic changes in technology, like shooting only film to video to digital.

Each new machine or technique, in a sense, changes all existing machines and techniques, by permitting us to put them together into new combinations. The number of possible combinations rises exponentially as the number of new machines or techniques rises arithmetically. Indeed, each new combination may, itself, be regarded as a new super-machine.

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.