Public Thinking Response

Many experts believe that the advancement in technology, notably the internet, has greatly propelled the literary skills of the new generation. Clive Thompson argues that the introduction of such technology and the addition of online abilities such as blogging have contributed immensely to more advanced skills. Clive Thompson elaborates on the idea that with all the new opportunities presented to us to write , or past decade of writing has blown up in the fact that many more people are writing more often and in better form. “Public Thinking.” This text is an excerpt from his book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For The Better, published on September 12, 2013 by Penguin Press HC. Thompson is a graduate of the University of Toronto with a degrees in english and political science. He is a freelance contributor for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and many other publications. Thompson aims to show people how much our writing has improved due to the internet. Thompson throughout this text is providing evidence to answer main argument of his text. All the writing performed today is changing or cognitive behavior for the betterment of society. Thompson’s goal is to show people how much the technology today has changed the way we write and how often we right now as well. Today not only working professionals produce written pieces. Teens do on social media and many adults are sending out emails multiples times a day. Thompson uses many examples from

history to support his claims in a more direct way to show how people would use the internet as a resource today and how people would have been better off in their endeavors if they have had the internet. In this paper, I will examine Thompson’s main claims, what evidence he used to support them, and how technology played a major role in advancing our literary skills.

Many people perform better when there is an audience. The audience effect is all around us; therefore, whether we are at work or in the classroom, it is present. Since people have been performing in front of an audience this effect has taken place. What it does is it drags the best version of people out to create a piece of work otherwise unobtainable if people were not going to critique it in every way. Clive Thompson writes,“In live, face-to-face situations, like sports or live music, the audience effect often makes runners or musicians perform better” (Thompson, Public Thinking 54). Thompson argues that, those who perform for an audience will spend more time perfecting their presentation. With the idea of  faceless people critiquing your performance, the amount of thought and work put into that task will be greater than the thought and work put into a task that is not presented.  Many students today do not have the motivation to write an impressive paper, but if they had the incentives to do so, such as writing for an online community, than their true rhetorical skills will be expressed in their writings. Thompson notes in his paper that Brenna Grey Clark, professor at Douglas College in British Columbia, used this concept to see if her students would perform better on their essays. She had her students write essays about Canadian authors and told them that their essays would be placed on Wikipedia, a highly public website where the audience can respond and alter entrees. Thompson reports that Clark stated of her students, “Often they are handing in these short essays without any citations, but with Wikipedia they were staying up till two a.m. honing and rewriting their entries” (Public Thinking 56). The internet helped connect Clark’s students to an audience that of which gave them incentives to write at a much higher level. Through the use of the internet and the concept of the audience effect, the quality in which the students wrote was far more superior than that at which they had been writing at before.

In the past few decades we have formed a writing movement. Never before has man written so much. Today’s youth, working class, and elderly are all writing emails to one another or

they are updating their social media timelines. The internet has provided the option and people built websites that provided the tools in which people today can write more often and more efficiently. Today people have the ability to write about a blog that upset them or that sparked an idea in them, or they can start their own blog. Thompson argues that we are in the middle of a literature revival which has not happened since Greece civilization. Andrea Lunsford a Stanford University english professor interviewed by Thompson stated, “I think we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which has not been seen since Greek civilization” (Public Thinking 67). Lunsford believes, that the rhetorical style in which students write today is similar to how the Greeks chose to write and speak. The Greek era is seen as one of the true enlightened periods in time where education was encouraged and writing skills, specifically rhetorical skills, were common with the educated. Thompson follows up by commenting that, “Today’s online writing is like a merger of that culture and the Gutenberg print one” (Public Thinking 67). Here Thompson argues, that just as how the Greeks enjoyed talking face-to-face, and how the printing press was able to take someone’s writing and send it all over the world in mass quantities, the internet age has combined the best of both.Through our words online we can speak as though we are face-to-face with someone who might be five miles away or five thousand miles away. An example to show is an article that was in the New York Times about a student at Rutgers University in 2011 who used his webcam to spy on his gay roommate, who later committed suicide. The story itself was over 1,300 words long but many of the 1,269 comments were quite a bit lengthier. The internet has made this access to the article possible but also it has given people the opportunity to express their thoughts on it.  This free range of writing has shaped a more literate and and comprehensive generation that has surpassed the ones before it.

The ability to connect with someone on the other side of the world in seconds is a feet all in itself but the internet is making this happen everyday and millions of times a day. Whether people want to talk to a relative or combine efforts with someone on the same project the internet makes this possible. Emails are a perfect example of this connection made everyday by millions. Everyday 154 billion emails are sent! Today anyone with a life altering idea, a new hypothesis, or a solution to an age old problem can see if another person, possibly on the other side of the world, has been pursuing the same goal can connect to them via the internet. This ability has skyrocketed the advancement in technology, academics, and nature awareness. Thompson proclaims that, “The internet is now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together” (Public Thinking 59). Thompson views the internet as a tool that has helped connect great minds so that even greater results will come from their cooperation. For example, in 1774 oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley in London but several years earlier a Swedish man by the name of Carl Scheele had also discovered the element. Since people many generations ago did not have the resources to know what was going on in other parts of the world, many  of the same discoveries and inventions were being made within just a few years of each other. These men and women had no idea that at the same time or possibly earlier than when they had made the discovery or invention others were doing the same thing or had already done so. Two other examples are that, the law of conservation of energy was discovered four times in 1847 and in 1610 and 1611 Galileo and three other astronomers discovered sun spots. These pioneers had no way of knowing for certain that at the same time as they were on the brink of a massive breakthrough or discovery that others were following up on the same big ideas.

This fact that many big ideas are found by multiple people at the same time is known as the theory of multiples. This theory was conceived by sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas in 1922. Ogburn and Thomas argued that, “it was because our ideas are, in a crucial way, partly products of our environment” (Public Thinking 59). They claimed that, the men and women who made the same discoveries within a short time period of each other had reached those results in part do to their similar environments. This idea implies that a man in London, England in 1700 will more then likely not have the same breakthrough discovery as a man in India in that same year. A breakthrough discovery for the man in India could have already been discovered in England many years before due to the technology available within both countries at that time. The internet today has solved that problem and great minds the world over can connect and team up persay to achieve the same goal. These men and women now write to one another every day through the use of the internet forever advancing the knowledge of man.

So has this explosion of writing in this generation changed the cognitive behavior of man? I do believe it has. Before it was that reading was the only method people used to advance their literary skills, but today people do not only read proficiently but they write too. A substantial factor in the advancement of the writing culture today is the internet. The internet provides a vast audience for people to write for. Now the example Thompson chose to use for the audience effect was that of Stanford students. Now they are far above the average student but that does not necessarily mean the audience effect will only work for them. People not only write for class, for work, but for pleasure now as well. This is due to all the social media sites people are apart of today. Open forums and blogs spark heated and detailed conversations and also promote for feedback from their viewers. People submitting their written works online have the world as their audience and this encourages them to write in more detail. The end result is the average level of writing today far surpasses that of past generations. People today can connect with each other from all over the world thus working in contrast to the theory of multiples. The connections made today by writing to others with similar beliefs and the ideas born from this has not only increased the amount of writing performed by people today but also has substantially increased the rate of technological advancement. In the world to come and the world we are in now, writing will be an influential and vital tool one must have to succeed in life.