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
Ways
Implicit
Doesn
Explicit
Trying
Destroys
Way
Sharp
Programming
Express
Relationships
Clarify
Meaning
Fuzzy

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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 use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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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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The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.
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There is no news industry.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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