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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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There is no news industry.
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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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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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[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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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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Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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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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