Clive Thompson’s Public Thinking

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Lawrence Besong

Professor Chris Werry

RWS 100

1 September 2014

Clive Thompson’s Public Thinking

            There seems to be a larger question that Clive Thompson is trying to answer in his essay. Thompson’s writing includes claims and evidence that state different examples of how society is affected by technology and how it evolves. Technology is changing the way people act and thinking about doing things. The larger question that Clive Thompson is trying to answer is, is the way technology affecting society for the better or for the worse? Thompson actually thinks technology is changing society for the better and is truly benefiting society. The Internet is a big factor in shaping society today, “The internet has produced a foaming Niagara of writing”(Thompson 46). Across the world, everybody uses the Internet to communicate, write, comment, read, and this shows how big the Internet’s involvement is with people.

            Thompson has many claims that he puts into his writing to get his point across to the reader. Clive Thompson expresses his take on writing and the Internet by comparing the amount of tweets, e-mails, blogs, etc. to the 35 million books in the U.S. Library of Congress. “On Facebook we write about 16 billion words per day”, which shows how much people are actually expressing themselves through the Internet without even knowing so. Thompson also makes a claim that technology helps create breakthroughs by connecting people all over the world. For example, Thompson stated how Duchesne found penicillin however he could not show it to the world because he was not known enough. However, thirty-two years Alexander Fleming rediscovered penicillin. If communicating through technology was possible back then, then millions of people would have been saved over those three decades. Thompson continued to

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support his claims with very heavy and well-proven evidence. A third claim that Thompson states in his text is that technology is not only helping for educational reasons but for everyday life as well. Thompson says “with mobile phones, our personal geography is becoming newly relevant in a new way…GPS turns your location into a fresh source of multiples…”(68). A GPS is just a microcosm of how technology is changing the modern world for the better.

            Is the way technology affecting society for the better or for the worse? Society has evolved technology for years now and things have only gotten better. As for the internet in today’s world, social media is actually contributing to writing without even knowing it. Things are changing, and things will always change in the technology world for the better. That is why young students, like myself should look forward to the future and strive to contribute to technological advancements for the better of society.