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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Technologically
Socially
Tools
Longer
Interesting

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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.
Clay Shirky
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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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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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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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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
Clay Shirky
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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?'
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky