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

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СКАЧАТЬ students made grammatical errors in freshman composition essays, going back nearly a century. She found that their error rate has barely risen at all.²⁴ More astonishingly, today’s freshman-comp essays are over six times longer than they were back then, and also generally more complex. “Student essayists of the early twentieth century often wrote essays on set topics like ‘spring flowers,’” Lunsford tells me, “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. And as for all those benighted texting short forms, like LOL, that have supposedly metastasized in young people’s formal writing? Mostly nonexistent. “Our findings do not support such fears,” Lunsford wrote in a paper describing her research, adding, “In fact, we found almost no instances of IM terms.” Other studies have generally backed up Lunsford’s observations: one analyzed 1.5 million words from instant messages by teens²⁵ and found that even there, only 3 percent of the words used were IM-style short forms. (And while spelling and capitalization could be erratic, not all was awry; for example, youth substituted “u” for “you” only 8.6 percent of the time they wrote the word.) Others have found that kids who message a lot appear to have have slightly better spelling and literacy abilities than those who don’t. At worst, messaging—with its half-textual, half-verbal qualities—might be reinforcing a preexisting social trend toward people writing more casually in otherwise formal situations, like school essays or the workplace.

      In 2001, Lunsford got interested in the writing her students were doing everywhere—not just in the classroom, but outside it. She began the five-year Stanford Study of Writing, and she convinced 189 students to give her copies of everything they wrote, all year long, in any format: class papers, memos, e-mails, blog and discussion-board posts, text messages, instant-message chats, and more. Five years later, she’d collected nearly fifteen thousand pieces of writing and discovered something notable: The amount of writing kids did outside the class was huge. In fact, roughly 40 percent of everything they wrote was for pleasure, leisure, or socializing. “They’re writing so much more than students before them ever did,” she tells me. “It’s stunning.”

      Lunsford also finds it striking how having an audience changed the students’ writing outside the classroom. Because they were often writing for other people—the folks they were e-mailing with or talking with on a discussion board—they were adept at reading the tempo of a thread, adapting their writing to people’s reactions. For Lunsford, the writing strategies of today’s students have a lot in common with the Greek ideal of being a smart rhetorician: knowing how to debate, to marshal evidence, to listen to others, and to concede points. Their writing was constantly in dialogue with others.

      “I think we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Greek civilization,” Lunsford tells me. The Greek oral period was defined by knowledge that was formed face-to-face, in debate with others. Today’s online writing is like a merging of that culture and the Gutenberg print one. We’re doing more jousting that takes place in text but is closer in pacing to a face-to-face conversation. No sooner does someone assert something than the audience is reacting—agreeing, challenging, hysterically criticizing, flattering, or being abusive.

      The upshot is that public thinking is often less about product than process. A newspaper runs a story, a friend posts a link on Facebook, a blogger writes a post, and it’s interesting. But the real intellectual action often takes place in the comments. In the spring of 2011, a young student at Rutgers University in New Jersey was convicted of using his webcam to spy on a gay roommate, who later committed suicide. It was a controversial case and a controversial verdict, and when the New York Times wrote about it, it ran a comprehensive story²⁶ more than 1,300 words long. But the readers’ comments were many times larger—1,269 of them, many of which were remarkably nuanced, replete with complex legal and ethical arguments. I learned considerably more about the Rutgers case in a riveting half hour of reading New York Times readers debate the case than I learned from the article, because the article—substantial as it was—could represent only a small number of facets of a terrifically complex subject.

      Socrates might be pleased. Back when he was alive, twenty-five hundred years ago, society had begun shifting gradually from an oral mode to a written one. For Socrates, the advent of writing was dangerous. He worried that text was too inert: once you wrote something down, that text couldn’t adapt to its audience. People would read your book and think of a problem in your argument or want clarifications of your points, but they’d be out of luck. For Socrates, this was deadly to the quality of thought, because in the Greek intellectual tradition, knowledge was formed in the cut and thrust of debate. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates outlines these fears:

      I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting²⁷; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

      Today’s online writing meets Socrates halfway. It’s printish, but with a roiling culture of oral debate attached. Once something interesting or provocative is published—from a newspaper article to a book review to a tweet to a photo—the conversation begins, and goes on, often ad infinitum, and even the original authors can dive in to defend and extend their writing.

      The truth is, of course, that knowledge has always been created via conversation, argument, and consensus. It’s just that for the last century of industrial-age publishing, that process was mostly hidden from view. When I write a feature for a traditional print publication like Wired or The New York Times, it involves scores of conversations, conducted through e-mail and on the phone. The editors and I have to agree upon what the article will be about; as they edit the completed piece, the editors and fact-checkers will fix mistakes and we’ll debate whether my paraphrase of an interviewee’s point of view is too terse or glib. By the time we’re done, we’ll have generated a conversation about the article that’s at least as long as the article itself (and probably far longer if you transcribed our phone calls). The same thing happens with every book, documentary, or scientific paper—but because we don’t see the sausage being made, we in the audience often forget that most information is forged in debate. I often wish traditional publishers let their audience see the process. I suspect readers would be intrigued by how magazine fact-checkers improve my columns by challenging me on points of fact, and they’d understand more about why material gets left out of a piece—or left in it.

      Wikipedia has already largely moved past its period of deep suspicion,²⁸ when most academics and journalists regarded it as utterly untrustworthy. Ever since the 2005 story in Nature that found Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica to have fairly similar error rates (four errors per article versus three, respectively), many critics now grudgingly accept Wikipedia as “a great place to start your research, and the worst place to end it.” Wikipedia’s reliability varies heavily across the site, of course. Generally, articles with large and active communities of contributors are more accurate and complete than more marginal ones. And quality varies by subject matter; a study commissioned by the Wikipedia Foundation itself found that in the social sciences and humanities, the site is 10 to 16 percent less accurate than some expert sources.

      But as the author David Weinberger points out,²⁹ the deeper value of Wikipedia is that it makes transparent the arguments that go into the creation of any article: click on the “talk” page and you’ll see the passionate, erudite conversations between Wikipedians as they hash out an item. Wikipedia’s process, Weinberger points out, is a part of its product, arguably an indispensable СКАЧАТЬ