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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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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Gets
Move
Egalitarianism
Small
Medium
Possible
Mediums
Moving
Forced
Social
Systems
Past
Size
Certain
Fame
More quotes by Clay Shirky
Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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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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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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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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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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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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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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