Quote

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?'

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Often
Claim
Thing
Cat
Going
Claims
Something
Singing
Make
Internet
Good
Democracy
Hear
Talking
Cats

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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
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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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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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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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