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.
Clay ShirkyTo 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.
Clay Shirky[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.
Clay ShirkyThe great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.
Clay ShirkyWith the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves โ the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public โ has stopped being a problem.
Clay Shirky