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

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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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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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky
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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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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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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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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