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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Also
Constituent
Constituents
Product
Products
Members
Groups
Society
Individual

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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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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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 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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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?'
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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