Clay Shirky Quotes

As a society, we haven't spent as much time building the citizen Internet.

Every time there's a new tool, whether it's Internet or cell phones or anything else, all these things can be used for good or evil. Technology is neutral; it depends on how it's used.

I have fun going on Twitter and the Internet. I feel safe and comfortable, and I wish everyone could feel that way.

Saving the Internet requires a greater sense of shared ownership and fewer bystanders accepting whatever today's Internet has to offer.

If multi-stakeholder Internet governance is to survive an endless series of challenges, its champions must commit to serving the interests and protecting the rights of all Internet users around the world, particularly those in developing countries where Internet use is growing fastest.

Web publishing can create common spaces; it all depends on how we, the readers and sometimes the producers, react to technological change. If we sort ourselves into narrow groups, common spaces will be in big trouble. But there's no reason not to have common spaces on the Internet. There are lots of them out there.

It's one of those secrets that not a lot of politicians realize: The Internet is not a 10th-tier policy issue. It's not an add-on policy. It's something that affects everybody's life.

Technology is neutral, but it all depends on the way we use it.

The Web belongs to everyone.

Over time, if you want rights, you have to also show that you can use them responsibly and that you can build a positive world in the online space, and that's also very important.

If you're 15 and you tell someone a secret, they can put it up on Facebook. If you make a mistake, someone films it on their mobile and puts it up on YouTube. When you're 15, you deserve privacy.

If our language, our programs, our creations are not strongly present in the new media, the young generation of our country will be economically and culturally marginalized.

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

We've never lived in an environment in which it has been so easy to capture information and share it. That fact that it is digital and easy to transmit exacerbates that. I don't know that we know yet what social norms we wish to adopt.

Many people see technology as the problem behind the so-called digital divide. Others see it as the solution. Technology is neither. It must operate in conjunction with business, economic, political and social system.

Ordinary Chinese are also getting unprecedented access to information. More than half a billion Chinese now use the Internet.

Computer literacy is a fundamental civil right.

Much of the civil rights work of this century will entail championing digital rights.

The public should have access to unfettered communication and commerce, and the Internet is increasingly the medium where that takes place.

Public participation helped create the Internet, and it helps protect it. That's worth celebrating and remembering.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

The Internet is fundamentally free, and when faced with the decision to use something free, we, as humans, always seek to grab all we can.

I'm lucky because the most dangerous thing that could happen to me is that someone will say something mean on a computer screen miles away, and so I feel like if that's all that I'm facing, then why would I not use my platform to talk about things?

I'm nervous about our civic culture. I'm not sure the Internet is largely the cause of it. It's certainly the cause of careless writing. People who get used to blurbing things on the Internet are never going to be good writers.

I have worked on open Internet, speech, and entrepreneurship issues for years.