Universal Authorship

Seed Magazine has this article on society moving from universal readership to universal authorship and what that may mean. One statistic the authors uses to makes their case is that by 2013, 100% of the world's population with will authors in some kind of media. At first glance that seems like too much too soon. There are countless people out there today who have access to every form on-line publishing, are perfectly capable of publishing content should they want to but are not authors. They just don't care to publish their ideas and opinions to the world - it is not important or interesting to them.

There is no reason why this kind of person in the next four years will suddenly morph into an author. Likewise, the legions of illiterates in the world will not likely become Twitter savvy in short order. That said, it the statistic is confusing. The other points the article makes are good ones - the degree of influence and the pace of social change and revolution even that burgeoning number of published authors will bring are definitely phenomena to watch for.