Clay Shirky

Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?

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.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate...

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.

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.

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

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.

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.