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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
Longer
Interesting
Technologically
Socially
Tools

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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[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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'
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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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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
Clay Shirky
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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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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
Clay Shirky
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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
Clay Shirky