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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
Underestimate
Access
Value
Information
Values
Overestimate
Systematically

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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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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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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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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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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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 loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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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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