Public Thinking

Bigger Question:

In "Public Thinking" by Clive Thompson, he discusses many concepts such as reading vs. writing, having an audience, and many people having the same idea around the same time, but in all there was a bigger question that he was eradicating from his work and the question was "Is our generation of teens and children becoming bigger and better writers." In the beginning of the text he discusses a Kenyan born girl who blogged about many of the hardships in her home country, when she was confronted about creating a book about her ideas she was daunted by the idea. But little did she know that she had already blogged enough to fill two telephone books. This created the idea that the new generation writes much more than they even know and the work that they produce proves to be much better quality than our preceding generation. This was also proven in a study by a Stanford University Professor Andrea Lunsford when she discovered that today's composition essays are on average six times longer and students would be writing many more personal narratives than in the early 20th century when it was popular to write about "Spring Flowers."(66)

Claims:

• The first main claim that I saw stated by Thompson was that he saw that many citizens in the United States and many other countries around the world have the thought that being an avid reader was much important than becoming an avid writer. While reading does promote extra thinking which leads to writing, many don't write their ideas down unless it is for school.
• An example from the text was when he stated that a scholar by the name of Deborah Brandt had pointed out that many parents  "Worked harder to ensure their children were regular readers, they rarely pushed them to become regular writers" (50)
• The next main claim that I had discovered in the text was a scientific finding called the "Audience Effect" which stated that when a writer has an audience they are much more likely to produce a more adequate piece of work than one they would have produced merely for a teacher.
• This finding was proven in a study conducted by a group of professors at Vanderbilt University where they had presented three groups of children all presented with the same task but given a different audience to see how they would be affected. It was shown that the group that had been given no audience had done much more poorly than the group that was asked to explain step by step their thinking process to their own mother (55)
• The last Big claim that I had noticed in Thompson s work was the Theory of Multiple. This Theory had stated that many of the modern large inventions had been created by different people all around the same time period.
• This was documented by sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas in 1992 when they surveyed the history of modern inventions and they discovered 148 examples such as the discovery of oxygen, the discovery of sunspots, and the radio.(59)