Public Thinking by Clive Thompson Analysis and Questions

Alex Schlack

RWS100

Chris Werry

September 1, 2014

“Public Thinking” Analysis

1)   Clive Thompson proposes lots of questions to the audience, but the most important one would have to be…”Why is it important and what are the benefits of reading and writing, also how are these new innovations and technological advancements pushing society to engage in this new era of thinking?   This question is generally answered by the various authors and professional writers that Clive uses as sources, when they say that, “writing changes our cognitive behavior,” and “We don’t write to clear our mind, we write to understand, to clarify our thinking.”  Brandt had a really good statement when comparing and contrasting the differences between this century’s lifestyle of writing to the past, when he stated,” When you are writing something online –whether it’s a one-sentence status update, a comment on someone’s photo, or a thousand word essay post-you’re doing it with the expectation that someone might read it.” This is spot on, because it exemplifies how the ever since the invention of the internet; social media, networking, and blogging about your life has increased the amount of writing and reading drastically, whereas in the 18^th and early 19^th century people were still writing letters, and even that was a rare event.   Public thinking today is more highly advanced, and inquire much more intellect when reading and writing, due to the new universal upgrades in technology. 

2)   Clive provides various outlined claims throughout his text, but there are three really important ones that need to be highlighted.  The first one being, that reading and writing is a part of life, that everyone does it and everyone has to do it because it is a necessity; our mind requires it in order to function properly and think highly.  Clive use of evidence in this claim is highly effective, for he uses lots of expert testimony. Having many popular journalists and American scholar whose expertise is in this subject is very helpful especially when agreeing upon the same matter.  Deborah Brandt, a researcher from American Literacy, studies the aspect of parenting and talked about how the parents in the 80’s and 90’s during the new industrial revolution, had started to push their kids to being regular reader. According to Brandt, “Reading…is a daily act crucial for navigating the world,” and “Is also understood to have moral dimension; it’s supposed to make you a better person.” Another one of his claims is to express with facts how far reading and writing have came throughout, history and how far it has expanded due to technological advancement.  Clive actually interviews his grandma and asks her questions about when she was young how the reading and writing were back in the past.  She said that thirty to forty years ago people only wrote letters, but only a couple times of year.  But before he talks to his grandma, he presents various statistics from the present era.  He states that there are, “500 million tweets on twitter, 1 million blog posts, 1.3 million blog comments, and 16 billion words per day.” That’s just in the US alone.  You see this is important because it clearly shows how different and far more interacted we are today compared to us thirty our forty years ago.   His evidence here consists of historical examples and comparisons.  Contrasting of the two shows how big of a change has occurred, and also shows that his evidence is credible through statistics and facts. The last main claim the Clive discusses about is the Internet and how it is a connecting machine.  People feel the need to tell the public about obscure information.  That’s where the Theory of Multiples comes in, which is when modern inventions and scientific discoveries, are hit upon different people usually within a few years after or from each other.  Ogburn and Thomas both state that, “They’re inevitable, the things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies on land.” What they are saying is that it is hard to listen and build of others with all the tools and information sitting right there waiting to be utilized.