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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
Improvement
Challenge
Tools
Challenges
Modern
Society
Social

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The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?
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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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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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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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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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It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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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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The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.
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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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There is no news industry.
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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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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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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.
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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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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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