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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
Tools
Challenges
Modern
Society
Social
Improvement
Challenge

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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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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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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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 systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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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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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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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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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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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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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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Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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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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There is no news industry.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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