Clay Shirky Quotes

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.

I'm interested in sites that help people find information and filter what's available. The Internet is so big that no one can stay on top of everything.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

There is an overwhelming amount of information available to us all on the web each day, not to mention what is shared with us by our family, friends, fans, and followers. This necessitates the need to filter through all that information and to decide for ourselves where to put our attention.

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.

I think something that's really understudied and misunderstood is the use of information.

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life. I just think that technology and information, it's overwhelming at the moment, but it's really going to make life better.

Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother with.

I'm not a library.

I'm pretty quick to delete something off of my phone if it's become obsolete. And things like RSS readers have made life easier - all of the headlines are going to be related to a topic I'm interested in.

People's minds are overloaded with information.

There is an explosion of information happening, yet people demand quick access to relevant content that cuts through the clutter.

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

Most of us feel overburdened by information, although I would say the overloaded feeling comes more from coordinating all of the information and responding to it.

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life.

We are drowning in information.

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.

There is always more information than attention

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

The cure to information overload is more information.