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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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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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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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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.
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There is no news industry.
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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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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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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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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 loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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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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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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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.
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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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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
Clay Shirky