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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Gain
Potential
Gains
Cost
Directing
Effort
Employee
Successful
Costs
Lower
Firm

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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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There is no news industry.
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Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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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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