Quote

Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Way
Sharp
Programming
Express
Relationships
Clarify
Meaning
Fuzzy
Ways
Implicit
Doesn
Explicit
Trying
Destroys

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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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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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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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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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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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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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