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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Behavior
Opportunity
Filtered
Motivation

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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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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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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Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
Clay Shirky
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We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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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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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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
Clay Shirky
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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.
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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky
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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
Clay Shirky
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
Clay Shirky
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Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
Clay Shirky
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
Clay Shirky