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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Complete
Completely
Ways
Wrong
Best
Right
Way
Behave

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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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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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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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 got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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