Besong 1
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.
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