In the excerpt from Clive Thompson’s book “Smarter than you think”, he presents several ideas of how the Internet affects people’s way of thinking and frequency of writing.
Firstly, the author claims that “the Internet has produced a foaming Niagara of writing”. With different calculations supporting his ideas, he argues that the Internet encouraged people to write and express their opinions using written text than ever before. Before the Internet, people rarely wrote a single letter while nowadays, according to Thompson, we produce 36 million books every day by expressing ourselves online. He states that being online enables us to engage in and comment on things we are interested in so not only we write when necessary but writing has naturally become a tool of our self-expression and an immense way of communication in today’s world.
Writing is also changing our cognitive behavior. In one way it may help us clarify our thinking and crystalize our thoughts. As the author states, “we do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand”. Sometimes our thoughts might be chaotic or unclear which is the time when writing comes into service in order to organize what we actually want to say. Furthermore, writing has a positive impact on our memory which the author explains by the “generation effect”. In his book, Thompson also mentions the “audience effect”. He claims that a shift in our performance occurs when we know that people are watching or when we know there is someone to judge our output. Even a small audience can motivate us to try to do better.
Lastly, the author introduces the Internet as a connection-making machine with a huge impact on public thinking. Connecting people with similar interests and obsessions can result in collaborating and creating bigger things than one can do on his own.
Generally, I agree with the text and with the fact that the Internet has helped spread writing in our society. I believe writing has many positive psychological and educational effects but my question is, is not it too much? It seems to me nowadays that people use written communication more than the oral communication which I consider the most important method. It is easier to express our opinions in a written form but would we be able to say what we write?
To me, the most interesting part of the text was discussing the “audience effect”. I was surprised by the results of some of the experiments mentioned in the book and also by stating the positive effect of the change in our performing in front of the audience. On one hand, it is undoubtedly good that it motivates us to perform better when people are watching, on the other hand, sometimes people’s performance is affected so much that it is way too far from who they really are, especially, when it comes to being online. As the author mentions, one of the unspoken main rules of online expression is be more interesting, however, online does not equal unreal.
RWS-510 Rhetoric and Culture 