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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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The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?
Clay Shirky
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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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 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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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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.
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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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
Clay Shirky
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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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Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
Clay Shirky
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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.
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
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Clay Shirky
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
Clay Shirky