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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.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Internet
Media
Individual
Means
Ideas
Mean
Circulation
Always
Disagree
Arguing

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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 are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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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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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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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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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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
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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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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.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky