Denis Pelli (NYU professor of psychology and neuroscience) and Charles Bigelow (professor at RIT and graphic designer of, among other things, Wingdings) wrote in Seed Magazine about how the fraction of the world’s population who write and publish is increasing rapidly, with the endpoint of everyone being a publisher coming, suprisingly, in the next few years:
In our analysis, we considered an author’s text “published” if 100 or more people read it. (Reaching 100 people may seem inconsequential, but new-media messages are often re-broadcast by recipients, and then by their recipients, and so on. In this way, a message can “go viral,” reaching millions.) Extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve (the dashed line) predicts that every person will publish in 2013. That is the ceiling: 100 percent participation. Provided current growth continues, the prediction of imminence is robust. Increasing the stringency of the criterion for “publishing” from 100 to 1,000 readers would reduce new-media authorship tenfold, but merely delays the predicted 100 percent participation by a year under this model.