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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Upgrading
Leap
Imagination
Possible
Faith
Always

More quotes by 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.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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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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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
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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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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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