A Writing Revolution. Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). Number of authors who published in each year for various media since 1400 by century (left) and by year (right). But does increasing authorship matter? Today, at 0.1 percent authorship, many people are trading privacy for influence. Public discussion creates a social conscience. Influenceur, autorité, passeur de culture ou l'un de ces singes exubérants. PeerIndex. Blog Archive » Attention Influence do not equal Authority. In the dustup over whether it is a good idea to sort Twitter posts by authority – defined as the number of followers one has – John Naughton rises above the cloud to see a larger fallacy in the discussion: The number of followers one has does not equal authority.
It stands for influence (or I’d say, it is a proxy for attention – and then, in some cases, influence). The problem Naughton sees is the same one that plagues analysis of online discussion using media metrics. In mass media, of course, big was better because you had to be big to own the press: Mass mattered. We still measure and value things online according to that scale, even though it is mostly outmoded. Indeed, we now complain about things getting too big – when, as Clay Shirky says, what we’re really complaining about is filter failure.
That is why Loic Le Meur suggested filtering Twitterers by their followers; he’s seeking a filter. The press was the filter. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I’ll go halfway there. Insulte du pêcheur à Nicolas Sarkozy.