What comes to mind when you think of social media? Many believe that it is corrupting young people, deteriorating their brains, and making them less productive. Well Clive Thompson believes the complete opposite as he states in the chapter “Public Thinking” in Smarted Than You Think.
Since the age of social media began with tools such as AOL Messenger and the launch of websites such as MySpace, it has been one of the most controversial subjects in the United States regarding teenagers and young adults. It is seen by many to be a place to simply waste time watching silly cat videos and show everyone your morning coffee from Starbucks. Thompson disagrees completely with that notion. Instead, he believes that in reality, all of these social media sites are a place to express one’s thoughts and views through writing in a public venue. For quite a while, Thompson has been arguing that social media is beneficial for teens, yet it wasn’t until he released his book that he gained widespread awareness from the nation. In his book, he argues that social media has encouraged our generation to improve their writing skills and write more often to effectively share their ideas. The many claims he professes in his work are supported by solid evidence as a result of his main strategy, extensive professional research. I will explore the main claims made in his book and evaluate the way Thompson structures his novel, states his claims and supports them with solid evidence to enlighten his readers on the benefits that social media has on transforming the coming generations to become bigger and better writers.
Thompson discusses the effects that having an audience can have on a person that is performing anything from a concert to a sports game to even choosing out a simple pattern. This effect is called the “Audience Effect”. He discussed the “Audience Effect” in a study that was performed by a group of professors at Vanderbilt University where they proved that having an audience can persuade the writer or performer to feel more compelled to produce better work than they would have if they had no audience. In the study at Vanderbilt, three groups of students were given the task to solve a pattern of different bugs, but each group had been given a different audience. The first group had been given no audience at all other than the observers and had to work in solitude. The second group had been asked to speak into a tape recorder and explain their actions. And the third group had been asked to explain to their mothers, at their side, what they were doing step by step. It was shown that;
The Children who solved the puzzle silently had the worst results. The individuals who talked into a tape recorder did better, concluding the simple act of articulating their thinking process aloud helped them think more critically and identify the patterns more clearly. Overwhelmingly, the individuals talking to a meaningful audience (their mothers) had the best results.(55)
In this example, Thompson suggests that even having the most miniscule audience such as a video camera can make you think more before you do something because you want to impress your audience. The Audience Effect doesn’t only occur based on the fact that the writer or performer only wants to impress their audience, but it occurs because the writer/performer wants to provide the audience with a piece of work that actually means something and of which they are proud.
Pride in writing for an audience was clearly illustrated by Thompson with the story of a Kenyan girl. Ory, a Kenyan blogger, had started to blog as a hobby until she had gained a substantial number of subscribers. At that point, it became much more than just a way to pass time. She began taking more time working on her pieces because, “Knowing I had these people reading me, I was very self conscious to build my arguments, back up what I want to say. It was very interesting; I got this sense of obligation.” (46) Thompson had determined this to be caused by the “Audience Effect”, which had a large impact on what Ory was producing and releasing to the public. She wasn’t just releasing any old piece of work but she felt as though they were demanding better of her and in turn she was demanding more from herself. Overall, Thompson had made an effort to prove that this idea that was originally discovered by scientists, exists everywhere in writing. With the influx of new writing due to the new digital age, many believe that It will have benefits for the community as a whole and for a writer individually.
With the rapid growth of technology in this new generation has elevated the art of writing to a whole new level. Thompson makes a significant claim that with the flood of new writing on the Internet will be very beneficial in clarifying our thinking, improving our memory, and performing better scholastically. Thompson states that writing is a way for a person to clarify their mind and get whatever is in their head down on a piece of paper. For example, “By putting half formed thoughts on the page, we can externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively.”(51) By saying this, Thompson explains that when you have a pen and piece of paper or alternatively a keyboard and a screen, you can release all those built up ideas laying around in your head that you could never keep straight and organize them in an effective manner.
Writing not only enables you to clear your mind, but it can also improve your mind by helping you remember things. This is called the “Generation Effect.” Thompson explains that “Writing improves your memory, write about something and you will remember it better.”(57) This idea of the “Generation Effect” was first tested in 1978 by two psychologists. In their study they had determined that fix quotations “Writing won out. The people who wrote words remembered them better than those who’d only read them- probably because generating text yourself “requires more cognitive effort than reading”(57). Thompson uses this study to prove that writing can also benefit us by helping us remember more clearly what we had put down on that peice of paper. He later states that “College Students have harnessed this effect for decades as a study technique”(57), in an effort to display that people use the “Generation Effect” in school as it benefits them. The digital age has not only benefited us as individuals but it has also created benefits for the larger community as Thompson claims that it can help us advance democracy and civil society. Ory’s blog provides a great example of the idea that writing on the Internet to advance politics is possible. Ory had written about her home country of Kenya, which she had left when she was a child. After a short time, Ory had developed a following when she discussed the politics of Kenya and how they needed a reform. “Her blog quickly became a clearinghouse for information on the crisis”(46). She had written about the rigged election and she wanted to see change and she did through her growing number of followers. She was even offered a deal to write and publish a book and also create a documentary. This proves that through writing on the Internet, Ory was able to make a difference in a home far from home.
But this Golden Age has also had large effects on students as they have become better writers just with the development of new technologies. With the new Golden Age of literacy upon us, we have seen an enormous flow of bigger and better writing from students of all ages. Thompson believes that with new technology the students of today have improved their writing to become better than those students of the past. Thompson had backed this claim with a study from Andrea Lunsford, a Stanford professor, showing how “today’s freshman-comp essays are over six times as longer than they were back then, and also generally more complex.”(66) Thompson uses the findings of Professor Lunsford to determine that students are becoming better writers due to the creation of the Internet and social media. Many students write much more for pleasure in today’s world because the ease of access to a larger audience than they had ever had before. It was found that “roughly 40 percent of everything that these students wrote was for pleasure, leisure or socializing”(67). Many would make an attempt to falsify his claim by stating that with the use of Instant Messaging that students would be more likely to use shortened versions of words and incorrect grammar, but Thompson disproves this by stating that out of 1.5 million words collected from works of teenagers, “only 3 percent contained IM-style short forms”(66). This is a great use of counterargument on Thompsons part as this would be one of the main rebuttals used by his critics.
Thompson organizes his claims and evidence in such a way that he would make a claim and then he would provide a strong counter argument backed by concrete evidence to show that the ideas that many have that could disprove his claims are actually false. One piece of this evidence that does provide comfort for sceptics is that all of Thompson's evidence used for the claim that students are becoming better writers, was provided by a Stanford professor from her Stanford students. As Stanford is home to the greatest minds in our country, this evidence does not provide a good sample of our community as a whole and can be falsified in that aspect. Overall, Thompson was able to provide many diverse claims that he had backed with all sorts of evidence in an effort to prove to his readers that this evolution of technology is actually a good catalyst for our generation of writers.
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