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The whole, 'Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Values
Maximise
Bigs
Civic
Whole
Civics
Done
Challenge
Thing
Internet
Really
Value
Good
Challenges
Public

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?'
Clay Shirky
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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 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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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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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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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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.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
Clay Shirky