Will the Writing Revolution Beget a Social Revolution?

For two summers in college, I volunteered to teach literacy to illiterate adults. Usually indistinguishable from their literate counterparts (employed, married, and beloved mothers and fathers), these adults had learned to adapt through cues, context, and concealment. They hid these deficiencies well, but bravely had chosen to finally take them head-on. The two summers I did this were very rewarding. I met some incredible people who allowed me to witness a different kind of courage.

More than once, I saw a person liberated from a way of living that was both secretive and demeaning. I clearly remember how joyful and confident the gift of even baseline literacy made these people.

Authors increasing over time (the black "book" line is flat when plotted on an annual basis)

Illiteracy is relatively rare in our world, but literacy is typically defined as the ability to consume information. In the current information landscape, it will be increasingly defined as the ability to also generate information — i.e., write.

This approaching universality of authorship is the premise of an interesting article in SEED magazine entitled, “A Writing Revolution.”

Clay Shirky has asserted that we are in the midst of “the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” The evidence that he’s correct keeps mounting.

How fast is authorship growing? Well, for books, authorship (defined as anything read by 100 people or more) increased by 10x each century. Currently, authorship is growing at 10x each year. That’s a 100x increase in rate.

Tthe authors of the SEED article, Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow, go on to suggest there may be a correlation between increases in authorship and social change:

The period of the first steep rise, near 1500, coincides with the discovery of the New World and Protestantism, which saw the publication of the first vernacular Bible, translated by Martin Luther. The second, near 1800, includes the Industrial Revolution and its backlash, Romanticism. The current rise is much steeper.

Or, as someone at a recent meeting tried to parse it, publishers are experiencing the Industrial Revolution, not the French Revolution. Now I’m not so sure. We might be experiencing both. After all, the Industrial Revolution led to a lot of social change.

It’s an interesting twist to the story. While publishers have worried about the “revolution” in publishing and what it might mean for our insular world, society as a whole may be on the verge of some revolutions, as well, with authorship moving from 0.01 percent of the population to 0.1 percent (this year), to 1 percent (next year), to 10 percent (in 2011) to 100 percent (by 2012).

As Pelli and Bigelow describe it:

Today, at 0.1 percent authorship, many people are trading privacy for influence. What will it mean when we hit nearly 1 percent next year and nearly 10 percent the year after as the current growth predicts? Governments, businesses, and organizations must adapt to a population that wields increasing individual power. Protestors used Twitter to discredit the election in Iran. When United Airlines refused to reimburse a musician for damaging his guitar, the offended customer posted a song online—“United Breaks Guitars”—and United’s stock dropped 10 percent.

It’s a reminder that publishers share their infrastructure with an audience that is also publishing; that power equations are shifting dramatically between providers and consumers; and that trust and curation will be vital to success.

When everyone is writing, the filter on reading may become more valuable than ever.