American - Writer | 1964 -
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.
Clay Shirky
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I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.
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Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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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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Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just don't. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.
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Facebook is not very good at dealing with named groups; they're not very good at saying, 'We've got this book club and I'm a member and you're not.' But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action.
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I certainly never intended for myself an academic career and, were the academy to suffer, I'd just go do something else. I don't have a commitment to it or to really, frankly, almost any institution that assumes that it has to be stable forever.
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How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
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Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.
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It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.
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