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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: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Social
Improvement
Challenge
Tools
Challenges
Modern
Society

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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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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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Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
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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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The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.
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Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
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[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.
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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
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So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
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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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We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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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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Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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