Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
positive. In live, face-to-face situations, like sports or live music, the audience effect often makes runners or musicians perform better, but it can sometimes psych them out and make them choke, too. Even among writers I know, there’s a heated divide over whether thinking about your audience is fatal to creativity. (Some of this comes down to temperament and genre, obviously: Oscar Wilde was a brilliant writer and thinker who spent his life swanning about in society, drawing the energy and making the observations that made his plays and essays crackle with life; Emily Dickinson was a brilliant writer and thinker who spent her life sitting at home alone, quivering neurasthenically.)
But studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.
You can see this audience effect even in small children. In one of my favorite experiments, a group of Vanderbilt University professors in 200812 published a study in which several dozen four- and five-year-olds were shown patterns of colored bugs and asked to predict which would be next in the sequence. In one group, the children simply solved the puzzles quietly by themselves. In a second group, they were asked to explain into a tape recorder how they were solving each puzzle, a recording they could keep for themselves. And in the third group, the kids had an audience: they had to explain their reasoning to their mothers, who sat near them, listening but not offering any help. Then each group was given patterns that were more complicated and harder to predict.
The results? The children who solved the puzzles silently did worst of all. The ones who talked into a tape recorder did better—the mere act of articulating their thinking process aloud helped them think more critically and identify the patterns more clearly. But the ones who were talking to a meaningful audience—Mom—did best of all. When presented with the more complicated puzzles, on average they solved more than the kids who’d talked to themselves and about twice as many as the ones who’d worked silently.
Researchers have found similar effects with older students and adults. When asked to write for a real audience of students in another country,13 students write essays that are substantially longer and have better organization and content than when they’re writing for their teacher. When asked to contribute to a wiki—a space that’s highly public and where the audience can respond by deleting or changing your words—college students snap to attention, writing more formally and including more sources to back up their work. Brenna Clarke Gray, a professor at Douglas College in British Columbia, assigned her English students to create Wikipedia entries on Canadian writers, to see if it would get them to take the assignment more seriously. She was stunned how well it worked. “Often they’re handing in these short essays without any citations, but with Wikipedia they suddenly were staying up to two a.m. honing and rewriting the entries and carefully sourcing everything,” she tells me. The reason, the students explained to her, was that their audience—the Wikipedia community—was quite gimlet eyed and critical. They were harder “graders” than Gray herself. When the students first tried inputting badly sourced articles, the Wikipedians simply deleted them. So the students were forced to go back, work harder, find better evidence, and write more persuasively. “It was like night and day,” Gray adds.
Sir Francis Bacon figured this out four centuries ago, quipping that “reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”14
Interestingly, the audience effect doesn’t necessarily require a big audience to kick in. This is particularly true online. Weinberg, the DuckDuckGo blogger, has about two thousand people a day looking at his blog posts; a particularly lively response thread might only be a dozen comments long. It’s not a massive crowd, but from his perspective it’s transformative. In fact, many people have told me they feel the audience effect kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers. I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of ten people (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from ten people to a million people.
This is something that the traditional thinkers of the industrial age—particularly print and broadcast journalists—have trouble grasping. For them, an audience doesn’t mean anything unless it’s massive. If you’re writing specifically to make money, you need a large audience. An audience of ten is meaningless. Economically, it means you’ve failed. This is part of the thinking that causes traditional media executives to scoff at the spectacle of the “guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks.”15 But for the rest of the people in the world, who never did much nonwork writing in the first place—and who almost never did it for an audience—even a handful of readers can have a vertiginous, catalytic impact.
Writing about things has other salutary cognitive effects. For one, it improves your memory: write about something and you’ll remember it better, in what’s known as the “generation effect.” Early evidence came in 1978,16 when two psychologists tested people to see how well they remembered words that they’d written down compared to words they’d merely read. Writing won out. The people who wrote words remembered them better than those who’d only read them—probably because generating text yourself “requires more cognitive effort than does reading, and effort increases memorability,” as the researchers wrote. College students have harnessed this effect for decades as a study technique: if you force yourself to jot down what you know, you’re better able to retain the material.
This sudden emergence of audiences is significant enough in Western countries, where liberal democracies guarantee the right to free speech. But in countries where there’s less of a tradition of free speech, the emergence of networked audiences may have an even more head-snapping effect. When I first visited China to meet some of the country’s young bloggers, I’d naively expected that most of them would talk about the giddy potential of arguing about human rights and free speech online. I’d figured that for people living in an authoritarian country, the first order of business, once you had a public microphone, would be to agitate for democracy.
But many of them told me it was startling enough just to suddenly be writing, in public, about the minutiae of their everyday lives—arguing with friends (and interested strangers) about stuff like whether the movie Titanic was too sappy, whether the fashion in the Super Girl competitions was too racy, or how they were going to find jobs. “To be able to speak about what’s going on, what we’re watching on TV, what books we’re reading, what we feel about things, that is a remarkable feeling,” said a young woman who had become Internet famous for writing about her sex life. “It is completely different from what our parents experienced.” These young people believed in political reform, too. But they suspected that the creation of small, everyday audiences among the emerging middle-class online community, for all the seeming triviality of its conversation, was a key part of the reform process.
Once thinking is public, connections take over. Anyone who’s googled their favorite hobby, food, or political subject has immediately discovered that there’s some teeming site devoted to servicing the infinitesimal fraction of the public that shares their otherwise wildly obscure obsession. (Mine: building guitar pedals, modular origami, and the 1970s anime show Battle of the Planets). Propelled by the hyperlink—the ability of anyone to link to anyone else—the Internet is a connection-making machine.
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.
This is known as the theory of multiples, and it was famously documented in 192217 by the sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas. When they surveyed the history of major modern inventions and scientific discoveries, they found that almost all the big ones had been hit upon by different people, usually within a few years of each other and sometimes within a few weeks. They cataloged 148 examples: Oxygen was discovered in 1774 by Joseph Priestley in London and Carl Wilhelm Scheele in Sweden (and Scheele had hit on the idea several years earlier). In 1610 and 1611, four different astronomers—including Galileo—independently discovered sunspots. John Napier and Henry Briggs developed logarithms