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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Hands
Someone
Multitasking
Around
Distraction
Like
Smoke
Pick
Picks
Second
Hand

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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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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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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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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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Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
Clay Shirky
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
Clay Shirky
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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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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.
Clay Shirky
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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 adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
Clay Shirky