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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Minors
Middle
Change
Optional
Minor

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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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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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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 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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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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.
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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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There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
Clay Shirky
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
Clay Shirky