Quote

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
Results
Temporary
Rather
Consumers
Means
Production
Mean
Productions
Amateur
Permanent
Category
Result
Consumer
Identity
Capability
Behavior
Categories

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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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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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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
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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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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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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