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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Fast
Feeling
Feelings
Good
Thinking

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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.
Clay Shirky
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Clay Shirky
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
Clay Shirky
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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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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.
Clay Shirky
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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?'
Clay Shirky
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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
Clay Shirky
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
Clay Shirky
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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.'
Clay Shirky
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
Clay Shirky
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
Clay Shirky