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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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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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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There is no news industry.
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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 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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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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 are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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