Response to “Public Thinking”

The larger question that Thompson is trying to answer is “how has the evolution of public writing influenced people’s thinking?” A quote that best answers this underlying question is when Thompson says, “The truth is, whatever new digital tools come around, curious people are going to colonize them. We’re social creatures, so we think socially,” (Thompson 69). This citation best answers Thompson’s question because he has given multiple points of evidence throughout his writing that public writing has help shaped how people have come to think. Public writing has allowed people to express their opinions on topics and have given them an outlet to show others what they think. There are endless amounts of upcoming technologies that will help further people’s pubic thinking and this citation supports the idea that people will take advantage of those new tools. As time has gone on people have become more and more interactive with one another and with the new technologies people are becoming more and more connected. 

One of Thompson’s claims is that author’s public writings have affected others more than the author may realize. He backs up his claim by introducing an internet blogger named Okolloh who has been making posts online about new information and her opinion on Kenyan politics. According to Thompson, “After a few years, she’d built a devout readership, including many Kenyans living in and out of the country…Okolloh wrote anguished posts, incorporating as much hard information as she could get. The president imposed a media blackout, so the country’s patchy Internet service was now a crucial route for news. Her blog quickly became a clearinghouse for information on the crisis,” (p. 46). This quotation is an example of how big of an impact an author can have on his readers. Okolloh did not know that her post meant so much to her readers and was shocked when asked to write a book. 

Another claim of Thompson’s is that public writings and communication play a big part in helping the public stay connected. He brings up how many well know scientific discoveries have occurred multiple time throughout history. For example, oxygen was discovered in 1774 by Josef Priestly in London and also by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in Sweden several years earlier (Thompson 59). Thompson states how if these scientists had know about one another’s discoveries then multiple accounts of the same discovers would not have occurred. A quotation that relates to this claim is when Thompson states, “And making connections is a big deal in the history of thought- and its future. That’s because of a curious fact: If you look at the world’s biggest breakthrough ideas, they often occur simultaneously to different people,” (p. 58). 

A third claim of Thompson’s was that students of the current generation are not lacking experience in advanced writing; their writing abilities have not lowered as much as others may think. He challenged how some people think that “college students today can’t write as well as in the past” (p. 66). He found out through one of America’s leading researchers, Andrea Lunsford, that current students’ error rate have barely risen at all. She explained how freshman comp essays are over six times longer than they were back then and how they are now more complex due to the change in topics that essays are written about. Other studies have also been done on how younger generations instant message. Studies have shown that only three percent of the words used were IM-style short forms. A quotation that supports Thompson’s claim is when Lunsford says, “Students essayists of the early twentieth century often wrote essays on topics like spring flowers, while those in the 1980s most often wrote personal experience narratives. Today’s students are much more likely to write essays that present an argument, often with evidence to back them up,- a much more challenging task,” (p. 66). This quotation exemplifies how topics of writing have change and how current topic provide students with a more advanced and challenging argument to write about.