Quote

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Values
Overestimate
Systematically
Underestimate
Access
Value
Information

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.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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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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If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
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.
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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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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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
Clay Shirky
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
Clay Shirky
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
Clay Shirky
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There is no news industry.
Clay Shirky
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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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