Clay Shirky Quotes

You make a choice whether or not to turn that TV on. We didn't even have a television in the house.

Short of throwing away all television sets, I really don't know what we can do about writing.

I don't even own a television. I'm proud of that.

Some researchers sensibly suggest that rather than worrying too much about which programs our children are watching, we should concentrate on trying to reduce the total amount of time they spend in front of the screen.

No matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an autonomous or creative being.

I don't watch TV or movies or play video games.

We're understandably worried that staring at screens all day, and blogging about our breakfasts, is turning America into a nation of narcissists. But the opposite might be true.

However little television you watch, watch less.

At every turn you have to find a new kind of self-sovereignty over your environment. Every kid I see is at the mercy of Periscope, Twitter, or an Angry Bird of some description. People are shackled to their mediocrity by companies and businesses who want to consume your life with theirs.

Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.

When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

Social media is a really cool way to tell your story to people who are interested in hearing it. It's not getting put through the filter of a television executive who's decided you're too old to justify the expenditure.

I don't even own a TV because I think it's the devil.

I haven't read a newspaper in 20 years. I don't look at the computer or anything. You have to have a filter on what you let in.

YouTube is akin to having my own network.

Your basic person wants to talk about material culture, internet culture. I think about God, cats, nature.

Kids aren't growing up with a sense of television as the aspirational place for their ideas.

We spend too much time fretting over the way the industry produces programming, and too little worrying about the way the public consumes it.

I did not, like my children and people today, grow up with television as part of my life.

Marketing is such a key issue; in fact, the marketing department is often involved in the approval of scripts now.

I also spend a lot of time on political blogs, and music blogs getting things for my radio show.

I don't spend most of my life in front of the media.

It is now such a complex society in terms of media. It just comes at us from every direction. You kind of have to push it all away.

It used to be that artists thought of nature as their environment. Now media is our environment. It has been for the past 50, 70 years. It's what you see on TV, on the computer, what is in the magazines and newspapers.

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.