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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
Socially
Tools
Longer
Interesting
Technologically

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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 someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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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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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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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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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Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
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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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There is no news industry.
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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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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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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
Clay Shirky