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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?

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Switch
Presented
Publish
Publishing
Mass
Internet
Future

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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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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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[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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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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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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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Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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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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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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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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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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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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