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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 61
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Society
Social
Improvement
Challenge
Tools
Challenges
Modern

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.
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It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'
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Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
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Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
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When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?'
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There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
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Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
Clay Shirky
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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
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The whole, 'Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.
Clay Shirky