Creative Populations
Over 6.215 billion people on the planet as of last year. That's a lot of toenail parings. Imagine the volume of ear hair in the older set. Over a billion people are between the ages of 14 and 24. There's a lot of adolescence in a billion adolescents, even counting those who have been forced to grow up too soon.
These ponderings began morbidly enough as I ran a mental projection of the number of people doomed by age, destiny, or circumstance... there will be a whole lot of us checking out over the next 10 or 20 years. Imagine the psychic burden that's going to put on the planet. Hell, Golby's projecting the load for us already. Things are going to get pretty freakazoid as the number of burials mounts.
Ever wonder how many people have lived on earth down through the ages? Here's an article that does a good job picking a number out of the air with a little demographic rationale thrown in.
Clay Shirky observed in February:
A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.
The web connected appliance that permits bloggery is getting so cheap and so available that I think we can assume that huge numbers of the one billion adolescents in the world will be turned on to this over the next few years, say eight percent or 80 million, a number I've picked out the air. (Regretably the global system of privilege and inequitable distribution of wealth will cause the death of as many or more, but let's not go there just now). About four percent of this 80 million will stick as bloggers, that's like from three to three and a half million adolescents coming on-line in an intense way. This standing wave front of turned-on young people will include many of the brightest and most creative. (Many other incredbly bright and creative people will be smart enough to keep their butts out of the chairs and their fingers off the keyboards). Where does all this lead? Certainly out of the murk of the trade shows and the conferences and into real life. Has anybody got a handle on what that is yet? It is certain to leave our sense of an A list dead by the side of the road. How many of these people will care who or what an Instapundit is or was? [Sandhill Trek: A Public Space for Self Expression]
11:35:24 PM 
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