2 thumbs up? Reachers predict by 2013 we'll all be tweeting

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

2 thumbs up? Reachers predict by 2013 we'll all be tweeting

Researchers are predicting that Twitter is going global: in just four
years, everyone on the planet -- some 10 billion people -- will be
tweeting.

Writing in Seed magazine, neuroscientist Denis G. Pelli and graphic
designer Charles Bigelow (he created the Lucida font) find that the
internet has brought us to the brink of universal literacy, and we're
also fast approaching universal authorship: "Nearly everyone reads.
Soon, nearly everyone will publish."

To illustrate this writing revolution, Pelli and Bigelow have
assembled what can only be called an "authorgraph," a chart plotting
the number of book authors from the middle ages to the present, and
the far greater number of authors using new media -- blogs, Facebook,
and Twitter -- since the year 2000.

read the whole post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/weblan



____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org