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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
Challenges
Modern
Society
Social
Improvement
Challenge
Tools

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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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 is no news industry.
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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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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 loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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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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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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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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