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
Cats
Talking
Claim
Often
Thing
Cat
Going
Claims
Something
Singing
Make
Internet
Good
Democracy
Hear

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.
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There is no news industry.
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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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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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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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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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[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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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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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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