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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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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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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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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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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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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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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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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 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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Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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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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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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