Clay Shirky Quotes

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

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.

Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.

Technology has become our culture

I think technology and smartphones created a huge paradigm shift that we can't fully comprehend, and I think in a lot of ways things are changing faster than we can really process.

Through all aspects of society be it art, design, the financial markets, government, technology or communications we are witnessing unprecedented global transformation - the result of which is impossible to predict.

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.

People can get information - on entertainment, politics, finance - much easier than before. That will change the way people do business, the way people live.

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.

Rarely do you walk down the street doing anything that my grandparent's generation did. And half of that comes with the technology advances.

Saudi Arabia has also changed. People today are connecting with each other all across the world through small gadgets and television. It's a different society.

In this century of hyper-postmodern ideals, with the digital future, we're segmented into different people, places, and things in a constant state of change.

In the 21st century, you have to use technology as one of the tools in the toolkit to bring about social change.

People are pushing against the fabric of society all the time.

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.

We do live in this age of new media.

Technologies and specific vendors may come and go, but massive cultural transformations and new kinds of relationships? Those don't go away.

Fashion definitely has the power to change the world.

By 2007, we were finally living in a culture where people get what networks are and what technology can do to connect people.

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.

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.

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.