Clay Shirky Quotes

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.

Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.

I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.

Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

The Internet isn't just itself a revolution - it sometimes starts them, too.

Advances in technology and the Internet have dramatically changed the way we communicate, live, and work.

I think the Internet is the greatest invention since women.

Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.

Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

The most important impact on society and the world is the cell phone. Cell phones have actually been one of the primary drivers in productivity improvements.

You couldn't have human society without language.

Human beings are human beings. They say what they want, don't they? They used to say it across the fence while they were hanging wash. Now they just say it on the Internet.

Thinking of that movie 'The Artist'; if anyone ever needed to reach anyone, I'm just thinking they didn't have cell phones, they didn't have Internet, they didn't have email, so I always wonder how it was back then where you had to be home if you needed to get a phone call; otherwise, people couldn't get a hold of you.

The evolution of social media into a robust mechanism for social transformation is already visible. Despite many adamant critics who insist that tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are little more than faddish distractions useful only to exchange trivial information, these critics are being proven wrong time and again.

I want to initiate a change in society in the long term.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press.

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.

It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people.

That is very different from how it used to be in the 20th century. Media was very one way. There's a small little industry. It broadcasted its message and everyone else in the world just had to listen. Now the internet is allowing what used to be a monologue to become a dialogue. I think that's healthy and actually restoring a more natural way.

Speech is civilization itself.

People will now go to films with subtitles, you know. They're not afraid of them. It's one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail. Maybe the only good thing to come of it.