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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
Age
American
Things
World
Online
Citizens
Internet
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More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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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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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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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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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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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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?'
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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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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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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