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It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Society
Admitting
Think
Significant
Thinking
Revolution
Positive
Internet
Nobody
Loses
Possible

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The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.
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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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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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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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There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.
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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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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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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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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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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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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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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[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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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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