Clay Shirky Quotes

Social media is changing the way we communicate and the way we are perceived, both positively and negatively. Every time you post a photo, or update your status, you are contributing to your own digital footprint and personal brand.

The way people express themselves online, that's also how they express themselves in the real world.

For a generation that gets most of its information off a computer screen (be it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter or what have you), an athlete has to be very careful about the public/private aspect of that. Be careful not to be overly critical, be careful with use of language, and understand the whole world is watching.

Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art - novelists are buying into it wholesale.

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

If you don't have a Facebook, like, you're nobody. There's all of these sort of requirements now, and if you don't have all of these things - Facebook, Twitter, etc. - you're made fun of. And Twitter for celebrities... everything is just getting so personal. Pictures of yourself, of what you're eating for breakfast.

I've stayed away from Twitter for a long time because I sort of didn't trust myself with such an intimate but very public way of relating to the world, but I feel like I've studied it enough.

We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.

Most days I am in public. If I go to the store, with social media, I'm in public. It might as well be a press conference.

I don't use Twitter. I'm a serious person.

I don't like to Google myself. I try and avoid it whenever I can.

Our generation's grown up with the Internet, so it's an extension of our social lives; it's an extension of us. It makes perfect sense for me to use that medium.

I have done a pretty good job of partitioning my life digitally, posting utterances and stories that I'm happy to share with anyone on Twitter, leaving a few sparse comments and 'Likes' on Facebook (I'm not a huge user of the service, I'll be honest), and sending any number of photos to thousands of 'followers' on Instagram and Tumblr.

Facebook's the real deal. Nobody can buy Facebook now. Everybody has taken an angle at it. But Facebook may be the place that organizes everybody's personal information. It's got a very good chance of being that.

A lot of people have put their lives online and are using MySpace to manage their social lives.

My public Facebook page is what it is. My Twitter account is sort of what it is, but if I'm totally honest with you, that is not my personal, private self. I have another Facebook page that is devoted to my dear friends and family, and they can keep in touch with me that way.

You lose your anonymity just like a helium balloon with a string. Therefore people are going to have their own opinion and they're going to write in whatever clever manner they desire.

Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place.

Forget about someone's resume or how they present themselves at a party. Can they blog or not? The blog doesn't lie.

I would rather Google other people than Google myself.

Well, there's that girl on the Internet - although this isn't an example of someone who doesn't know they're on - but there's a girl on the Internet who posts one photograph every two minutes from her bedroom.

Approximating authenticity online is not such a tall order. In fact, it may be the very least we can do.

Social media really makes it tricky for people sometimes because you go, 'Oh, it's awesome. I'm gonna play this character. I'm going to do this really weird thing on camera,' and then you go back and read all your tweets and go, 'Mmm, well, I guess they didn't like that so much.'

I don't have an Instagram or anything like that. I have Twitter for work and also to read my news.

Thanks to an immersive lifestyle that involves Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, we've created a psychological three-sided mirror for our social impact on others.