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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: 61
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
American
Things
World
Online
Citizens
Internet
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More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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There is no news industry.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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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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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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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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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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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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