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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

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Permanent
Category
Result
Consumer
Identity
Capability
Behavior
Categories
Results
Temporary
Rather
Consumers
Means
Production
Mean
Productions
Amateur

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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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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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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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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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[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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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?
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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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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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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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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.
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