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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?'
Clay Shirky
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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Good
Democracy
Hear
Talking
Cats
Often
Claim
Thing
Cat
Going
Claims
Something
Singing
Make
Internet
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If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to 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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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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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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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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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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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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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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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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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