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
Move
Egalitarianism
Small
Medium
Possible
Mediums
Moving
Forced
Social
Systems
Past
Size
Certain
Fame
Gets

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Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
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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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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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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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.
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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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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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