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

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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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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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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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'
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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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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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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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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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.
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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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.
Clay Shirky
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
Clay Shirky