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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
Value
Information
Values
Overestimate
Systematically
Underestimate
Access

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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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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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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[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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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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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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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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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