Quote

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Among
Social
Primates
Sense
Gorillas
Also
Chimpanzees
Life
Relatives
Primal
Closest
Literally

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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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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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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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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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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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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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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[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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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