Final Thompson Paper

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

September 23, 2014

Many of us find ourselves perusing the internet at some point in our day; some more than others. We can look towards Asia, particularly in South Korea, and here in the United States, as examples of these heavy internet users. Youth can spend up to sixteen hours a day on the internet, mostly playing video games. But what else do we do on the internet? Does it hurt or help us? 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. His work relates 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. They claim that nothing good comes from using the internet. They cite nasty, naive comments found on YouTube and other social media with a comments section. However, Thompson as well as other professionals believe that the iGeneration’s frequent use of the internet is improving their ability to think and write; and suggests that everyone should do the same. 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. In Nicholas Carr’s piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr believes that the ability to read through long passages has been negatively affected by use of the internet. I’ll admit, I myself find it hard to read long paragraphs; and would end up asking for a “TL;DR”, short for “Too long, didn’t read” when I’m perusing forums. But aside from the YouTube comment battles and other tactless postings, there is quite a bit of substance on the internet. Thompson is amazed at the amount of writing available to peruse and discuss. “The internet has produced a foaming Niagara of writing. E-mails, tweets on Twitter, blog posts and comments … doing an extraordinarily crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, and sticking only to e-mails and utterances in social media, I calculate that we’re composing at least 3.6 trillion words daily” (47).

We’re not writing 3.6 trillion words a day just to stint our brain’s growth. 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. In fact, these theories support the idea that internet use improves our thinking and analyzing of text; as well as create professional discussions about them. Thompson cites 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.

By writing towards an audience, a person has the potential to invoke critical thinking and discussion amongst others. Thompson takes a moment to explain the concept of the “audience effect -- the shift in our performance when we know people are watching” (54). 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.

However, your writing doesn’t have to be about mind-numbing politics and ethics to create professional discussion. One can write about sex and sappy movies and still create a healthy think tank. I would be bold to say that the best discussions come from writing about the trivial things in life. 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 about bloggers 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. Though it can house the rude and naive, it also has room for the thinkers and debaters. Thompson doesn’t really address the skeptics; instead he layers benefits over benefits over benefits as to make the internet appear to be one of the hearths of discussion for today’s world. I would have liked to see Thompson address some of these skeptics -- maybe by pulling work from students who don’t attend prestigious schools. From a slightly hedonistic standpoint, I have to agree that the benefits of the internet that were presented by Thompson outweigh the drawbacks that I tried to address in this piece. The internet is definitely making us “Smarter Than You Think”.