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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Internet
Share
Age
American
Things
World
Online
Citizens

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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 change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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 systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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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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Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
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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 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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.
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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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