Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
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 post—you’re doing it with the expectation that someone might read it, even if you’re doing it anonymously.
Audiences clarify the mind even more. 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 clichés and lazy, autofill thinking, become painfully obvious. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo—an upstart search engine devoted to protecting its users’ privacy—writes about search-engine politics, and he once described the process neatly:
Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions.11 This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it. You have a lot of opinions. I’m sure some of them you hold strongly. Pick one and write it up in a post—I’m sure your opinion will change somewhat, or at least become more nuanced. When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.
“Hand waving” is a lovely bit of geek coinage. It stands for the moment when you try to show off to someone else a cool new gadget or piece of software you created, which suddenly won’t work. Maybe you weren’t careful enough in your wiring; maybe you didn’t calibrate some sensor correctly. Either way, your invention sits there broken and useless, and the audience stands there staring. In a panic, you try to describe how the gadget works, and you start waving your hands to illustrate it: hand waving. But nobody’s ever convinced. Hand waving means you’ve failed. At MIT’s Media Lab, the students are required to show off their new projects on Demo Day, with an audience of interested spectators and corporate sponsors. For years the unofficial credo was “demo or die”: if your project didn’t work as intended, you died (much as stand-up comedians “die” on stage when their act bombs). I’ve attended a few of these events and watched as some poor student’s telepresence robot freezes up and crashes … and the student’s desperate, white-faced hand waving begins.
When you walk around meditating on an idea quietly to yourself, you do a lot of hand waving. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, as Weinberg points out, the hand waving has to end. One evening last spring he rented the movie Moneyball, watching it with his wife after his two toddlers were in bed. He’s a programmer, so the movie—about how a renegade baseball general manager picked powerful players by carefully analyzing their statistics—inspired five or six ideas he wanted to blog about the next day. But as usual, those ideas were rather fuzzy, and it wasn’t until he sat down at the keyboard that he realized he wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to say. He was hand waving.
“Even if I was publishing it to no one, it’s just the threat of an audience,” Weinberg tells me. “If someone could come across it under my name, I have to take it more seriously.” Crucially, he didn’t want to bore anyone. Indeed, one of the unspoken cardinal rules of online expression is be more interesting—the sort of social pressure toward wit and engagement that propelled coffeehouse conversations in Europe in the nineteenth century. As he pecked away at the keyboard, trying out different ideas, Weinberg slowly realized what interested him most about the movie. It wasn’t any particularly clever bit of math the general manager had performed. No, it was how his focus on numbers had created a new way to excel at baseball. The manager’s behavior reminded Weinberg of how small entrepreneurs succeed: they figure out something that huge, intergalactic companies simply can’t spot, because they’re stuck in their old mind-set. Weinberg’s process of crafting his idea—and trying to make it clever for his readers—had uncovered its true dimensions. Reenergized, he dashed off the blog entry in a half hour.
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