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Brett Schwarz

Professor Werry

RWS 101

2, September 2014

Public Thinking Response

Since the introduction of the internet, writing has become as big a part of one’s life as reading. People today use it for recreation or for talking to friends and relatives across the planet. Plus now an email only takes seconds to reach someone whereas a letter would take days. The culture of the 21st century and the late 20th century has become more connected than ever and now most people are writing everyday and not only higher educated professionals.In “Public Thinking” by Clive Thompson, he tries to solve the question that is, how has the internet changed the way and the amount people today write and he uses three main claims to help show how the internet has influenced more people to write more.

So how has the internet changed the way and the amount people write today? Before the introduction of the internet the only time people would actually write (paragraph or more) were in letters and that was seldom for most. Or people would write for their professions but normally that would only be for some specific jobs such as being a lawyer. Now “people read in order to generate writing; we read from the posture of the writer; we write to other people who write” (Dr. Deborah Brandt, Public Thinking 45). Dr. Brandt, a scholar who researched American literacy in the 1980s and ‘90s, believes that do to the internet we are are global culture of writing. This is do to writing emails, writing blogs, or writing about the food one had just devoured or threw up.

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Before many people only read but now reading and writing have become blended to the extent that people now have many different opportunities to comment on what they had just read.

Thompson used three supporting claims to further his thoughts on how the internet has evolved writing. Writing for an audience will cause a writer to produce a more masterful piece of writing than just writing for their professor. This is  known as the audience effect. A professor at Douglas College in British Columbia, Brenna Grey Clark, assigned her students to write a wiki on Canadian writers to see if their performance would improve.  Normally the students were “handing in these short essays without any citations, but with Wikipedia they were staying up till two a.m. honing and rewriting their entries” (Brenna Clarke Grey, Public Thinking 48). By creating these works of writing and submitting them on the internet the students worked more diligently to make sure their works were up to par.

Another of Thompson’s main claims was that the internet has turned our generation into one that not only reads but also writes. Before the introduction of the “internet only professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists,lawyers, and marketers, would write daily” (Clive Thompson, Public Thinking 44). The average blue collar American worker really had no obligation or intention of writing. Now with the internet we compose 154 billion emails, 500 million tweets, 1 million blog posts, 1.3 million blog comments, and about 12 billion text messages a day.  The amount of writing our generation has composed is far greater than all other ones to have come before us.

The final claim Thompson expresses is that the internet is a connection making machine. Clive Thompson states that “the internet now is the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads

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together” (Public Thinking 50). Before the internet to connect people who had the same revolutionary ideas looming in their heads, brilliant men were inventing and discovering the same things within a few years of each other but in different areas around the world, so they had no way of knowing anyone else was working on the same thing as them. For example oxygen discovered in 1774 by Joseph Priestly in London and by Carl Scheele in Sweden. Scheele had actually discovered it a couple years earlier. Another example is that in 1610 and 1611 Galileo and three other astronomers had discovered sun spots. This is known as the theory of multiples. Today the internet is here to allow men and women to connect to others around the world who are working on the same ideas as they are.

With the invention of the internet people now everyday are reading and writing. The internet has connected billions and has helped raise writing to a platform it had never been to before.