Cognitive Surplus Quotes

“Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“How we treat one another matters, and not just in a "it's nice to be nice" kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“multitude of books is a great evil”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to acquire a culture that rewards their members for doing that hard work. It takes this kind of group effort to get what we need, not just what we want; understanding how to create and maintain is one of the great challenges of our era.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

“Theories of generational difference make sense if they are expressed as theories of environmental difference rather than of psychological difference. People, especially young people, will respond to incentives because they have much to gain and little to lose from experimentation. To understand why people are spending so much time and energy exploring new forms of connection, you have to overcome the fundamental attribution error and extend to other people the set of explanations that you use to describe your own behavior: you respond to new opportunities, and so does everybody else, and these changes feed on one another, amplifying some kinds of behavior and damping others. People in my generation and older often tut-tut about young people’s disclosing so much of their lives on social networks like Facebook, contrasting that behavior with our own relative virtue in that regard: “You exhibitionists! We didn’t behave like that when we were your age!” This comparison conveniently ignores the fact that we didn’t behave that way because no one offered us the opportunity (and from what I remember of my twenties, I think we would have happily behaved that way if we’d had the chance). The generational explanations of Napster’s success fall apart because of the fundamental attribution error. The recording industry made that error when it became convinced that young people were willing to share because their generation was morally inferior (a complaint with obvious conceptual appeal to the elders). This thesis never made sense. If young people had become generally lawless, we’d expect to see a rise not just in sharing music but also in shoplifting and other forms of theft.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

“when we use a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

“If a change in society were immediately easy to understand, it wouldn't be a revolution.”
― Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age