How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
Clay ShirkyRead
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
Interpretation
What this quote means
The rise of amateur production suggests that being a consumer is not a fixed role but a temporary state influenced by new capabilities.
Clay Shirky's quote emphasizes that the advent of new technology has transformed the way we engage with content. Traditionally, individuals were seen as consumers of media, but now, with tools easily accessible for content creation, people can actively participate and produce. This shift indicates that the label of ‘consumer’ is not permanent; instead, it reflects a dynamic identity shaped by the evolving landscape of technology and media engagement.
Themes
Amateur ProductionConsumer IdentityTechnologyMediaContent Creation
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the impact of social media, you might quote Shirky to illustrate how anyone can now be a content creator.
More from Clay Shirky
All quotes →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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It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.
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What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
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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.
Clay ShirkyRead
Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.
Clay ShirkyRead
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