Quote

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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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Social
Systems
Past
Size
Certain
Fame
Gets
Move
Egalitarianism
Small
Medium
Possible
Mediums
Moving
Forced

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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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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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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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?'
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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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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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[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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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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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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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