Walking around an average college campus, one see’s almost everyone on his or her phone texting, tweeting, or emailing. Clive Thompson insists that these small tasks add up. Thompson’s first supporting claim is that the internet, and technology in general, have caused people to write more than any generation has before. And of course, with practice comes more skill. Briefly, he suggests that “the internet has produced a foaming Niagra of writing”(46). He uses the word ‘Niagra’ because it is one of the most well-known and largest waterfalls with extreme power and force. In order to help the reader grasp how much the internet has increased our writing, Thompson reports some shocking statistics:
Each day, we compose 154 billion emails, more than 500 million tweets on Twitter, and over 1 million blog post and 1.3 million blog comments on WordPress alone. On Facebook, we write about 16 billion words per day. That’s just in the United States: in China, it’s 100 million updates each day on Sina Wiebo, the country’s most popular microblogging tool, and millions more on social networks in other languages worldwide, including Russia’s VK. Text messages are terse, but globally they’re our most frequent piece of writing: 12 billion per day(47).
Thompson uses this evidence to cause the reader to realize how much we really write. He uses examples that his readers will likely relate to; so rather than saying how many books are written in a year, he estimates how many tweets are written in a day. However, Thompson does not give a source to where he found these numbers, which makes this evidence less credible and makes the argument weaker. He says that he calculated these numbers himself, but him being a poetry major does not convince me that these are accurate statistics.
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