In just four years, everyone on earth may be an author. When books were the dominant form of publishing, a small minority of the world’s population had their words published. Now, Twitter, Facebook, and social networking sites are making authors into the majority. From the year 1400 to 2000, according to Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow in Seed, the number of published authors rose by tenfold every century. For the past decade, authorship has grown by tenfold every year. Eventually, the authors predict that everyone on earth will be published.

Near-universal authorship is changing society, Pelli and Bigelow write. People are “trading privacy for influence,” and businesses and governments are being forced to adapt to the power that individuals now wield. People who fret about illiteracy throughout the world may soon extend their concern to people who can’t publish.

That concern is misguided, Albert Jay Nock writes for the American Conservative. Universal literacy creates near-universal mediocrity in literature, according to Nock. Teaching the world to read creates a market for schlock that forces worthwhile literature out of the market. In the article, which is fittingly behind a paywall, Nock writies:

The average literate person being devoid of reflective power but capable of sensation, his literacy creates a demand for a large volume of printed matter addressed to sensation; and this form of literature, being the worst in circulation, fixes the value of all the rest and tends to drive it out.

Nock laments mass literacy for the bad writing it creates. He should prepare for mass authorship.

Source: Seed, American Conservative (subscription required)

Image by  Foxtongue , licensed under  Creative Commons .

UPDATE: We tried to reach Albert Jay Nock for a comment, but found the conversation a trifle one-sided. Indeed, Nock has been dead for more than half a century. We regret the error.

Recording college lectures gives students the opportunity to learn beyond the restraints of a brick-and-mortar schoolhouse. The audio and video recordings also give professors the opportunities for disaster. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that one professor was placed on administrative leave after appearing in a video called “apparently baked professor” that was posted on YouTube. Another recording pushed the lines of legality after a private conversation between a professor and a student about grades—a subject protected by federal statutes—was recorded and almost posted online. 

The new recordings may threaten “the traditional freewheeling spirit of the classroom” according to the Chronicle, if professors are scared of saying the wrong thing on camera. Colleges are working to curb this tendency by making it easier on faculty to edit the recordings at will. With camera phones sitting in the pockets of nearly every student in college, however, the editing software may not offer much protection.

Image by Emily Walker, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Millions of people came together online during the 2008 election, working to get Barack Obama elected president. They donated money, made phone calls from the internet database, organized meetings, and blogged on the candidate’s website. And now, Barack Obama knows about all of them.

Many gave up their information willingly, volunteering their emails to sign up for MyBarackObama.com’s cutting-edge web 2.0 functionality or yielding their cell phone numbers to receive text messages with the latest campaign updates. The campaign’s army of volunteers also took to the phones and to the streets, asking people for information on their political leanings and issues important to them. According to Technology Review, the Democratic National Committee acquired some 223 million pieces of data on potential voters in the final two months before the election.

That information isn’t going away when Obama moves into the White House. People used to joke that the Republican Party was so successful at “microtargeting,” and knowing about potential voters, that they knew what kind pizza that each voters liked. Now, “GOP's data-gathering efforts look like the work of amateurs,” James Grimmelmann writes for the New Republic.

Some have suggested that Obama could use his databases to lobby Congress on legislation and motivate people to contact their representatives. “ Just one problem,” Karl Rove wrote last month in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. “It's illegal. There are statutory prohibitions on the White House from using tax dollars to directly lobby Congress by unleashing emails, calls and visits.” 

The Obama administration could use its massive trove of information for other, more nefarious purposes. “It turns out that the Obama campaign's use of the data is almost completely unregulated,” Grimmelmann writes. MyBarackObama.com’s watery privacy policy states that the campaign can “make personal information available to organizations with similar political viewpoints and objectives, in furtherance of our own political objectives,” leaving the door open for information sharing between the campaign and the NSA, the FBI, or even marketing companies.  

The likelihood of the Obama administration selling its databases for money, or even sharing it with the NSA, seems slim. “The Obama campaign has the means and the opportunity to violate your privacy,” Grimmelmann writes, “but it doesn't have much of a motive.” The FBI and the NSA already have the necessary means to get that kind of information, and the Obama team wouldn’t want their databases compromised by outside influences.

The stronger likelihood, according to Gillian Reagan writing for the New York Observer, is that the Obama campaign will continue on its web 2.0 course. The President-elect has already started releasing videos over YouTube, and has added a “Join the Discussion” feature to their Change.gov website, allowing people to weigh in on issues important to them. According to Reagan, there’s been talk of creating automatically generated voter profiles, with information on people’s personal voting districts and allowing them to easily connect to their elected representatives.

Tech experts are hoping that “Mr. Obama can convince the public to channel the energy wasted on inconsequential Internet tendencies into getting involved in government,” Regan writes. They could leverage their existing information to facilitate a greater connection between the government and other citizens, as long as other issues, including health care, the economy, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, don’t get in the way first.

Image by Quinn Dombrowski, licensed under Creative Commons.

Privacy experts panicked last week when a federal judge ordered Google to turn over sensitive information about its users to Viacom. The New York Times reports that some believe, “the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed.” Viacom asked for the information to assist in a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google’s video sharing site YouTube, but the case is sure to have larger implications than a few illegally posted videos. 

Some privacy advocates have called attention to the inevitable flaws in Google’s system of collecting private data. Writing for Computer World, Jaikumar Vijayan asked, “what is Google doing collecting and retaining all that data in the first place?” According to Vijayan, the company is clearly trying to improve targeted marketing campaigns, but users should be skeptical of any company that keeps such a huge cache of personal information. 

There is one way that Google could get back into the good graces of some privacy advocates. If they’re being forced to turn over all the personal information to Viacom, TechCrunch suggests that Google should simply produce it in dead-tree paper form. The information they’re ordered to turn over is estimated at about 12 terabites—enough to fill up the Library of Congress. Printing it all out wouldn’t be eco-friendly, but it would definitely slow down Viacom’s efforts to parse the info.

UPDATE: What does 12 terabites of data look like? Neatorama breaks it down: 2,615 DVDs or 5 billion single-spaced typewritten pages.

After the Virginia Tech massacre, much of the public conversation focused on the tension between community safety and individual privacy. We heard from members of the university’s English department, who referred Seung-Hui Cho to counseling after reading his disturbing creative writing assignments. Could they—or should they—have done more to prevent the shootings?

Writing in Academe, Monica Barron addresses a more fundamental, less-discussed question: long before a creative writing teacher has to decide whether to call the counseling center or the police, how can she be attentive to the emotional realities of writing and reading—and in a way that both attends to safety concerns and honors the vocations of writing and teaching? For Barron, a professor at Truman State University and an editor of Feminist Teacher magazine, the answer lies in cultivating within the writing classroom an emotionally sensitive community that is itself capable of authorizing certain readings of its shared narratives, de-authorizing others, and discerning boundaries.

One highlight is her brief recounting of the Virginia Tech tragedy itself:

One April morning in Blacksburg, Virginia, a young man packed up his guns and went to school for the last time. He was done struggling to be part of any community of readers or writers. He was entering the community of killers. His fellow writers had noticed and remarked that he wasn’t simply retelling the stories of the tribe or trying to scare peers with over-the-top, out-of-control representations of experience; he himself was scary. His teachers were faced with a kind of reading they were unequipped to do: reading as diagnosis.

Our national community of readers is familiar with this narrative, with the riveting blow-by-blow of a shocking event. Barron retells it from a perspective few understand—that of the people charged with nurturing creativity, thought, and community in young adults.

—Steve Thorngate