Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ certainly, measured against the prose of an Austen, Orwell, or Tolstoy, the majority of online publishing pales. This isn’t surprising. The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously said something like, “Ninety percent of everything is crap,”² a formulation that geeks now refer to as Sturgeon’s Law. Anyone who’s spent time slogging through the swamp of books, journalism, TV, and movies knows that Sturgeon’s Law holds pretty well even for edited and curated culture. So a global eruption of unedited, everyday self-expression is probably even more likely to produce this 90-10 split—an ocean of dreck, dotted sporadically by islands of genius. Nor is the volume of production uniform. Surveys of commenting and posting generally find that a minority of people are doing most of the creation we see online.³ They’re ferociously overproductive, while the rest of the online crowd is quieter. Still, even given those parameters and limitations, the sheer profusion of thoughtful material that is produced every day online is enormous.

      And what makes this explosion truly remarkable is what came before: comparatively little. For many people, almost nothing.

      Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college. This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers, or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn’t true of the average nonliterary person. The one exception was the white-collar workplace, where jobs in the twentieth century increasingly required more memo and report writing. But personal expression outside the workplace—in the curious genres and epic volume we now see routinely online—was exceedingly rare. For the average person there were few vehicles for publication.

      What about the glorious age of letter writing? The reality doesn’t match our fond nostalgia for it. Research suggests that even in the United Kingdom’s peak letter-writing years⁴—the late nineteenth century, before the telephone became common—the average citizen received barely one letter every two weeks, and that’s even if we generously include a lot of distinctly unliterary business missives of the “hey, you owe us money” type. (Even the ultraliterate elites weren’t pouring out epistles. They received on average two letters per week.) In the United States, the writing of letters greatly expanded after 1845, when the postal service began slashing its rates on personal letters and an increasingly mobile population needed to communicate across distances. Cheap mail was a powerful new mode of expression—though as with online writing, it was unevenly distributed, with probably only a minority of the public taking part fully, including some city dwellers who’d write and receive mail every day. But taken in aggregate, the amount of writing was remarkably small by today’s standards. As the historian David Henkin notes in The Postal Age, the per capita volume of letters in the United States in 1860 was only 5.15 per year.⁵ “That was a huge change at the time—it was important,” Henkin tells me. “But today it’s the exceptional person who doesn’t write five messages a day. I think a hundred years from now scholars will be swimming in a bewildering excess of life writing.”

      As an example of the pre-Internet age, consider my mother. She’s seventy-seven years old and extremely well read—she received a terrific education in the Canadian high school system and voraciously reads novels and magazines. But she doesn’t use the Internet to express herself; she doesn’t write e-mail, comment on discussion threads or Facebook, post status updates, or answer questions online. So I asked her how often in the last year she’d written something of at least a paragraph in length. She laughed. “Oh, never!” she said. “I sign my name on checks or make lists—that’s about it.” Well, how about in the last ten years? Nothing to speak of, she recalled. I got desperate: How about twenty or thirty years back? Surely you wrote letters to family members? Sure, she said. But only about “three or four a year.” In her job at a rehabilitation hospital, she jotted down the occasional short note about a patient. You could probably take all the prose she’s generated since she left high school in 1952 and fit it in a single file folder.

      Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing⁶; consumption, not production. Deborah Brandt, a scholar who researched American literacy in the 1980s and ’90s, has pointed out a curious aspect of parenting: while many parents worked hard to ensure their children were regular readers, they rarely pushed them to become regular writers. You can understand the parents’ point of view. In the industrial age, if you happened to write something, you were extremely unlikely to publish it. Reading, on the other hand, was a daily act crucial for navigating the world. Reading is also understood to have a moral dimension; it’s supposed to make you a better person. In contrast, Brandt notes, writing was something you did mostly for work, serving an industrial purpose and not personal passions. Certainly, the people Brandt studied often enjoyed their work writing and took pride in doing it well. But without the impetus of the job, they wouldn’t be doing it at all. Outside of the office, there were fewer reasons or occasions to do so.

      The advent of digital communications, Brandt argues, has upended that notion. We are now a global culture of avid writers. Some of this boom has been at the workplace; the clogged e-mail inboxes of white-collar workers testifies to how much for-profit verbiage we crank out. But in our own time, we’re also writing a stunning amount of material about things we’re simply interested in—our hobbies, our friends, weird things we’ve read or seen online, sports, current events, last night’s episode of our favorite TV show. As Brandt notes, reading and writing have become blended: “People read in order to generate writing⁷; we read from the posture of the writer; we write to other people who write.” Or as Francesca Coppa, a professor who studies the enormous fan fiction community, explains to me, “It’s like the Bloomsbury Group in the early twentieth century, where everybody is a writer and everybody is an audience. They were all writers who were reading each other’s stuff, and then writing about that, too.”

      We know that reading changes the way we think. Among other things, it helps us formulate thoughts that are more abstract, categorical, and logical.

      So how is all this writing changing our cognitive behavior?

      For one, it can help clarify our thinking.

      Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.

      Poets famously report this sensation. “I do not sit down at my desk⁸ to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind,” Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. “If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it … We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” William Butler Yeats originally intended “Leda and the Swan” to be an explicitly political poem about the impact of Hobbesian individualism; in fact, it was commissioned by the editor of a political magazine. But as Yeats played around on the page, he became obsessed with the existential dimensions of the Greek myth of Leda—and the poem transformed into a spellbinding meditation on the terrifying feeling of being swept along in forces beyond your control. “As I wrote,” Yeats later recalled, “bird and lady took such possession of the scene⁹ that all politics went out of it.” This phenomenon isn’t limited to poetry. Even the workplace that Brandt studied—including all those memos cranked out at white-collar jobs—help clarify one’s thinking, as many of Brandt’s subjects told her. “It crystallizes you,”¹⁰ one said. “It crystallizes your thought.”

      The explosion of online writing has a second aspect that is even more important than the first, though: it’s almost always done for an audience. When you write something online—whether it’s a one-sentence status update, a comment on someone’s photo, or a thousand-word СКАЧАТЬ