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

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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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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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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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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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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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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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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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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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 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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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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