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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
Done
Challenge
Thing
Internet
Really
Value
Good
Challenges
Public
Values
Maximise
Bigs
Civic
Whole
Civics

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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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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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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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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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 loss of control you fear is already in the past.
Clay Shirky
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
Clay Shirky
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
Clay Shirky
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There is no news industry.
Clay Shirky
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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
Clay Shirky
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We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
Clay Shirky
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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