When we change the way we communicate, we change society
Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.
The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.
[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.
Upgrading one’s imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.
How we treat one another matters, and not just in a “it’s nice to be nice” kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.
People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.
Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.
Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
[T]he category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.
Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.
Civic participants don’t aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate…
Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group.
Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?
Until recently, ‘the news’ has meant to different things – events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.
The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ into ‘share, then gather’.
One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction…
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.