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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
Social
Improvement
Challenge
Tools
Challenges
Modern
Society

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.
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There is no news industry.
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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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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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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[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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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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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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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky