Even More Thompson Paper Updates

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

September 20, 2014

How often do you think out loud? Do you accidentally blurt out your thoughts? Do you try to voice your opinions publicly? Do you attempt post deep and meaningful just to get attention on social media? This piece touches on some of these subjects in Clive Thompson’s book, “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better”. Clive Thompson is a Canadian writer whose works have appeared on The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Wired, and other famous publications. Most of his work relates to technology and its social and developmental impacts. Most older people think negatively of the iGeneration, also known as those who were born around the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s. Thompson seeks to shed some light on them; especially through his concept of public thinking. What is public thinking? In this piece, I analyze Thompson’s idea of public thinking through discussing the main claims and arguments he presents throughout “Smarter Than You Think”.

Quite a few adults believe that this generation of youth’s writing abilities are hindered by new technology, particularly the internet. However, Thompson and other researchers have theories and research to argue that the internet doesn’t necessarily have adverse effects on this generation’s ability to think, debate, and analyze. Thompson samples research from Andrea Lunsford, a Stanford University English professor who “is one of America’s leading researchers into how young people write” (66). Lunsford describes her discoveries with synonyms to “awe”, such as “stunning”, and “striking,” (67) and claims that “we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization” (67). Furthermore, Thompson highlights the comments section of a New York Times article; describing them as “remarkably nuanced, replete with complex legal and ethical arguments” (67). This evidence suggests that not only has this generation’s writing  has improved, but their ability to discuss and debate is slowly becoming that of the ancient Greeks; who were known to be the grandmasters of discussion.

These benefits can not only apply to college papers and comments sections. It has the potential to reach out to people on a larger scale. Take for example Ory Okolloh, Thompson’s first subject in Smarter Than You Think. Okolloh, an American blogger of Kenyan descent, took to the internet to voice her thoughts on the unusual 2007 election in Kenya. These thoughts, alongside facts and evidence and a media blackout in Kenya, quickly made Okolloh one of Kenya’s main sources of information for the presidential ordeal in Kenya. However, outsiders from Kenya who also wanted more information about the ordeal also looked to Okolloh’s blog. With the right amount of rhetoric and appeals, any person with a computer, the internet, and some decent understanding of grammar has the potential to reach to the masses like Okolloh did.

While Okolloh’s version of public thinking was radical in the sense of increasing attention about a corrupt government, public thinking doesn’t just have to be about politics and human rights. At first, Thompson believed that every popular blogger would talk about human rights and government everywhere they went. “I’d naively expected that most of them would talk about the giddy potential of arguing about human rights and free speech online. But many of them told me it was startling enough to just suddenly be writing, in public, about the minutiae of their everyday lives … they suspected that the creation of small, everyday audiences among the emerging middle-class online community, for all the seeming triviality of its conversation, was a key part of the reform process” (57-58). Thompson’s false assumption implies that one does not have to be an activist to be a public thinker. Multiple topics can be touched upon using public thinking; but it seems that the most popular topics are also those that are frequently discussed by the middle class. This leads to another implication: popular public thinkers are mainly comprised of those in the middle class. So what does this all mean? Well, if we go by the common belief of “a strong upper class has an ever stronger middle class,” public thinking [about anything] amongst the middle class produces an overwhelming amount of benefit. Public thinking leads to better writers and rhetoricians, and better writers and rhetoricians can lead to a better community -- be it as small as an online forum or as large as Kenya; like in Ory Okolloh’s case.

Thompson’s overall argument in “Smarter Than You Think” is that public thinking through the internet has tremendous benefits. It can promote advocacy or humor the middle class. While at times it is true that the internet can be a not-so-productive tool, Thompson disregards that possibility and strictly goes over the benefits. Thompson should have addressed these issues to help make himself more credible and make the piece even more interesting.