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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
Society
Social
Improvement
Challenge
Tools
Challenges
Modern

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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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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There is no news industry.
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To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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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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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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