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

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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There is no news industry.
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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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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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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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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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 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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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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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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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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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