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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: 61
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Optional
Minor
Minors
Middle
Change

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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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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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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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[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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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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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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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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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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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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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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