Clay Shirky responds to various

When we think about distributing ourselves, do we abandon ourselves in that we lose the potential for this kind of knowledge?

Of course -- how could it be otherwise?

Width vs. depth tradeoffs are always like this. The ascetic and the
collaborator have different ways of knowing the world, and those ways
involve investments of time and energy that are incompatible.

This leaves the question of how much use of the medium is going
towards distribution. as we see from the rise of mobile use, arranging
real-world meetings among small groups is a killer app. It also leaves
open the question of how much of the distribution is so wide as to
kill the "know each other well" test -- inside Wikipedia's vast
population are small social networks of close collaborators. The
trend, though is clearly towards more distribution, even though we
will not end up lurching to the extreme.

The result, I think, will be less work that assumes long, solitary
cycles. As an example, as books give way to a wider range of long-form
writing (with the return of long essays, episodic fiction, and so on)
I think the idea of the novel as the normal form of literary
expression will (further) fade. We can, of course, already see a
similar change in the sciences, with the increasing number and
geographic distribution of co-authors.

Paradoxically, though, we will come to prize great novelists *more*,
because the people who can write a novel and make it stick, who can
make an argument for that way of working even when economic and
industrial models don't make it the default case, will be that much
more rare and important.

Does anybody still listen to any of The Beatles' solo albums in their entirety?

No*.

Nick thinks this is a bad thing:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/05/long_player.php

I think it's just a thing:
http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/08/01/
new_freedom_destroys_old_culture_a_response_to_nick_carr.php
--
* in the manner of first approximations, like most social questions

"We" assume people feel confident in their voice, feel as though what they have to contribute will matter and be valued. We may talk about how we value everyone, but even if that were true (which I don't believe it is), there's huge variation in people's sense of their value.

As a plug for important work on this line of thinking, Eszter
Hargittai's piece on "the participation divide" -- "Consistent with
existing literature, creative activity [in online spaces] is related
to a person's socioeconomic status as measured by parental schooling."
-- is great. http://www.webuse.org/the-participation-divide-content-creation-and-sharing-in-the-digital-age/

"We" assume that the collective voice will be populist and, more importantly, that it will reflect the diversity of the populous. Yet, as we've seen time and time again, certain values and attitudes and voices are over-represented in crowd-sourced activities. Who is looking out for those who aren't represented? In what ways are we reinforcing structural inequalities? What are the implications of this?

danah, as Yochai put it, "Loosely coupled systems need motivated
actors." This seems to me to be not just true, but a deep truth --
when discovery or creation of new opportunities is placed outside
managerial culture, it's the people who volunteer who end up making
the work. (Not for nothing do working Open Source projects call their
governance structures "Do-ocracies".)

When society has wanted to increase diversity, we have generally
placed the costs of the change on these same managerial structures --
the money for the EEOC comes from taxation and goes to creating
technocratic oversight and private rights for workers, in order that
we reduce discrimination in the workplace. This model is incompatible
with projects where there is no incorporated entity, where there
workers are volunteers, where being the boss is a matter of moral
suasion instead of contractual obligation.

So, to re-ask your question in a non-rhetorical way, under what
circumstances would we want to make the population of Deviant Art,
say, less white, or Linux less male, and if we wanted to do so, what
would need to happen?