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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

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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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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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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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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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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.
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Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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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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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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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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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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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.
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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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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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