Lawrence Besong
Professor Chris Werry
RWS 100
6 September 2014
Public
Thinking
How amazing
is it to realize that our generation is the generation of the future? Who would
have ever thought that spending your free time on the computer could contribute
to something so much bigger? Clive Thompson is a Canadian freelance journalist,
blogger and science and technology writer. In the second chapter, “Public
Thinking,” of Clive Thompson’s book Smarter
Than You Think, Thompson describes how various technological innovations
impacts our society for the better. Modern society is changing as we speak and
will continue to evolve over time. Clive Thompson answers the question, “Is
society changing the way we think for the better?” by the use of extraordinary
claims supported by intriguing evidence. He weaves his way through the minds of
his audience by opening up new thoughts towards the advancements of technology.
I plan to analyze Thompson’s text by dissecting his claims with a mix of my opinions
and his supporting evidence.
Thompson
starts off his text by introducing the reasons why technology impacts us
without us even recognizing it. He states a modern way of public thinking by mentioning
the act of blogging and other social media that requires writing. Thompson throws
a substantial statistic towards us when he states, “I calculate that we’re
composing at least 3.6 trillion words daily, or the equivalent of 36 million
books every day. The entire U.S. Library of Congress, by comparison, holds
around 35 million books (Thompson 47). Is there a difference between writing
your thoughts down on a paper and posting your thoughts on the Internet? As
Thompson explains to us that we each write the equivalent of novels with the
amount of writing we do without us knowing it. I began to realize that posting
your thoughts to blogs could be very beneficial. By blogging, you open up
plenty of opportunities to connect with others and possibly collaborate and combine
your thoughts to create something spectacular. There is a popular cliché that
has been repeated over several generations, “two heads are always better than
one.” The idea of connecting with one another via the World Wide Web,
regardless of your location throughout the world, is astonishing. In Thompson’s
text, he uses supporting evidence of how technology plays such a huge role in
communicating with others. Ernest Duchesne was a French military student who
conducted an experiment, which involved treating sick guinea pigs with a
solution, also known as penicillin. However, he could not show his findings to
the world “because he was unknown and young… only twenty-three at the time…” (Thompson
61). Thirty-two years later, “Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming rediscovered
penicillin, independently and with no idea that Duchesne had already done it.
Untold millions of people died in those three decades of diseases that could
have been cured. Failed networks kill ideas.” (Thompson 61). Due to the fact
that the two scientists do not have the resources that we possess today,
millions of people died from a curable disease. These people would never have died
because of the way our modern society works today. If there were to be an
extreme epidemic today, most of the world would know within an hour. Through
television, the Internet, social media and the telephone, news of the epidemic
would spread faster than the disease itself. That is an amazing thing to think
about. Nowadays we, as a society, have
advantages that the generations before would only dream to have.
Clive
Thompson then switches gears and starts to speak to the reader about the
“audience effect”. He introduces us to an obvious fact: that an individual
performs better while in front of an audience, literally and figuratively. The
audience effect is present in many different aspects, whether it is “In live,
face-to-face situations, like sports or live music, the audience effect often
makes runners or musicians perform better” (Thompson 54). Thompson claims that
those who perform in front of an audience will better prepare for their
performance. There will always be that thought in the back of your head that
makes you wonder if you are being judged. In my opinion, this notion makes
sense. The saying “practice makes perfect” comes to mind. We, as human beings,
perfect our craft though repetition and practice. We prepare and practice in order to not make mistakes,
in fear that others will criticize us. Thompson believes that students nowadays
do not have incentives to write high caliber papers. What better to gain
incentive by adding the audience effect? For example, “when asked to write for
a real audience of students in another country, students write essays that are
substantially longer and have better organization and content than when they’re
writing for their teacher” (Thompson 55). The students were given an incentive
and they performed to a higher standard. The audience effect can change and
modify our society for the better. However, how does this relate to technology
advancing how we learn or perform in the classroom? Brenna Clarke Gray, a
professor at Douglass College in British Columbia, used the same idea as the
researchers to see whether or not her students writing could be improved. Gray
assigned her students a paper on Canadian writers, that would be submitted on
Wikipedia, a highly visited website from people all over the world. Brenna
Clarke Gray said this in hopes that it would give her students the motivation
to take this paper more seriously. After this experiment, she stated this
observation about 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” (Brenna Clarke Gray, Public Thinking 56). When
the students submitted papers that were not acceptable, the very critical
Wikipedia community would delete their entries. The students were then forced
to continue trying until their papers were sufficient enough to post. Gray’s
research is a prime example of how technology, the Internet, and the audience
effect are linked together. Thompson then begins to talk about a blogger who
has an audience of thousands reading his blog. Having an audience over the
Internet, Weinberg continues to post and excel in writing for his public blog, knowing
that many readers have access to his them. Even though Weinberg is just labeled
as a blogger, like other journalists and authors, he is using technology to write
and he expresses his life stories through written words. Thompson states
“writing about things has salutary cognitive effects. For one it improves your
memory…” (Public Thinking 57). Whether it is writing in your journal, in class,
or online through your blog, writing is beneficial to the author. Children in
this generation spend hours on their computers writing on social media, posting
on their own blogs, or providing feedback and commenting to other writers.
Thompson believes that this is a positive thing towards society. Writing and
expressing yourself online is definitely better than not writing at all.
Adults in
this generation believe that technology is causing our writing to drop in skill
level. Throughout this entire paper, I have stated Thompson’s claims with his
supporting evidence as to why adults are incorrect. Thompson believes the best
way for young students to prosper in writing is through the use of technology. Clive
Thompson mentions research from Stanford University English professor, Andrea
Lunsford. Lunsford conducted a study that required her to “convince 189
students to give her copies of everything they wrote, all year long, in any
format: class papers, memos, emails, blog and discussion-board posts, text
messages, instant-message chats, and more” (Public Thinking 67). She collected
a copious amount of young scholar pieces of writing. Lunsford discovered that
those students wrote an astonishing amount outside of the classroom. She said,
“They’re writing so much more than students before them ever did…It’s stunning”
(Public Thinking 67). Thompson then begins to talk about a New York Times article
that explained how the reader’s comments were “remarkably nuanced, replete with
complex legal and ethical arguments” (Public Thinking 67). This gives us a
glimpse of how skilled many of the Internet’s writers and bloggers are. This
evidence shows a large improvement of writing by today’s generation, as opposed
to those before us.
The world
that we are living in continues to change, day by day, gradually becoming a
better place with the help of technology. Young students are producing quality
pieces of writing by simply being themselves, using their computer to conduct
blog posts and using the written word to express their intellectual minds. With
expanding their minds through social media and technology, students are continually
increasing their writing skills. In Thompson’s text, “Public Thinking”, he
claims, through superb supporting evidence, as to why technology is advancing
the world that we live in. He shows the audience that our technology driven generation
is beneficial to today’s society, and that our students’ minds are being
challenged rather than wasted. Our generation will continue to progress each
and every day and I am very excited to see what the future holds.
