Clay Shirky Quotes

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

I grew up before computers. Computers are changing things, not all for the good.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

Information technology and the Internet are rapidly transforming almost every aspect of our lives - some for better, some for worse.

Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.

The smartphone revolution is under-hyped, more people have access to phones than access to running water. We've never had anything like this before since the beginning of the planet.

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.

I think there's been a major shift in grass roots media because of the Internet and because the geeks and nerds rule the world. They are in control in so many ways.

I actually think the one who is underestimated in terms of impact he's had on society is Bill Gates. The reason is that with the innovation of software, he really allowed the computer revolution to take hold.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined to become the most important tool for cultural change in human history.

The mobile industry changed Africa.

The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.

The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.

Perhaps the most encouraging trend is that, through technology, people are realizing how much agency they actually have. Technology has revolutionized the way we eat, live, communicate, socialize, learn, and do. We see enormous potential to create lasting, positive change in the way the world works by doing what we are doing.

We're still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.

We changed the world many ways with the Internet.

The Internet isn't just itself a revolution - it sometimes starts them, too.

The digitization of our society is a challenge that is both legislative and philosophical.

I think there's a gigantic generation gap in terms of how people understand the Internet and how much they think technology is an important factor in social change.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

I think that I am seeing the Internet and seeing technology take and seeing how the work I do through music directly affects people's lives better than any politician I've ever met.

The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

I think up until that time a lot of focus on Internet coverage was either sort of the bits and bytes aspect of it, sort of the high-tech aspect of it, and the sociological aspect of it, which is how it was transforming culture.