An ariticle in Seed magazine forsees a future where we will all be authors.
By 2000 there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
Here’s how they plot the changes:
They speculate about the implications of this, and I agree that the general impact could be to distribute power more widely and away from small elites. (Though I don’t want to get too wide-eyed).
It reminds me of what I wrote four years ago, linking the notion of being an author with that of authority. If more of us become authors of our own experience, that must represent a significant shift in how power is used in the world.
Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan
