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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
Leap
Imagination
Possible
Faith
Always
Upgrading

More quotes by 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.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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.
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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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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do 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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[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.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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 are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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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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The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?
Clay Shirky
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Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
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