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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
Overestimate
Systematically
Underestimate
Access
Value
Information
Values

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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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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.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.
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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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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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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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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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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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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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