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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.
Clay Shirky
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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Curious
Average
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Power
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Several
More quotes by Clay Shirky
Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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[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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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 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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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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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Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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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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