Response to Thompson's "Public Thinking"

Ally Ferrell

Professor Werry

RWS 100

3 September 2014

Response to Thompson’s Public Thinking

     In his essay Public Thinking, Clive Thompson is attempting to answer one of the biggest    

questions of modern day writing, which is “how does the internet affect today’s written works 

and society as a whole”? Thompson reports “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely 

wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or 

college”(48). According to him, the internet has greatly changed the attitude about writing from a 

chore to a hobby which in turn has changed writing into a more useful and practiced resource. 

His answer, succinctly, is that the internet has improved the quality, amount, and spread of 

written works.

     When somebody writes something that will be posted on the internet, he or she now has 

an audience. Thompson’s first supporting claim to his main argument is that having an 

“audience”, or a group of people reading a person’s work, causes the author to write more 

carefully and with much more evidence because he or she now probably has critics who will 

refute a weak argument. Thompson argues this personal experience in his essay :

    Bloggers frequently tell me that they'll get an idea for a blog post and sit down at the keyboard in a state of excitement, ready to pour their words forth. But pretty soon they think about the fact that someone's going to read this as soon as it's posted. And suddenly all the weak points in their argument, their cliches and lazy, autofill thinking, become painfully obvious.(52)

Having more carefully though out arguments out there helps to create more sophisticated counter 

arguments and spark new ideas.

     Thompson’s second supporting claim is that the internet has made writing a much more 

common practice. He reports the statistics “Each day, we compose 154 billion e-mails, more than 

500 million tweets on Twitter, and over 1 million blog posts 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”(46-47). Although these are not usually formal or very long posts, they add up to a 

lot more writing than was done before the internet. Thompson recounts that his mother that grew 

up in the age before the internet, only wrote a few letters a year, much like most people from her 

generation. Even a small and casual comment, tweet, or e-mail helps the author practice putting 

his or her words onto paper, which can be very difficult to some.

     Another supporting argument from Thompson is that the internet has greatly improved the 

collaboration and spread of information. He gives examples, or perhaps counterexamples, of how  

many scientific discoveries were discovered multiple times without the others’  knowledge 

(58-59).  With the internet, this is far less likely to happen because when a scientist, for example, 

posts his or her progress or discoveries, other scientists are able to collaborate or build off  of the 

others work so he or she doesn't have to repeat it. The accessibility to written works due to the 

internet has helped with the general progress in our society.