Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
later, a pair of scientists in Britain—Ernest Chain and Howard Florey—read about Fleming’s work, intuited that penicillin could be turned into a medicine, and quickly created an injectable drug that cured infected mice. After the duo published their work, Fleming panicked: someone else might get credit for his discovery! He hightailed it over to Chain and Florey’s lab, greeting them with a wonderfully undercutting remark: “I have come to see what you’ve been doing with my old penicillin.” The two teams eventually worked together, transforming penicillin into a mass-produced drug that saved countless lives in World War II. But for years, even after they all received a Nobel Prize, they jousted gently over who ought to get credit.
The business world is even more troubled by multiples. It’s no wonder; if you’re trying to make some money, it’s hardly comforting to reflect on the fact that there are hundreds of others out there with precisely the same concept. Patents were designed to prevent someone else from blatantly infringing on your idea, but they also function as a response to another curious phenomenon: unintentional duplication. Handing a patent on an invention to one person creates artificial scarcity. It is a crude device, and patent offices have been horribly abused in recent years by “patent trolls”; they’re people who get a patent for something (either by conceiving the idea themselves, or buying it) without any intention of actually producing the invention—it’s purely so they can sue, or soak, people who go to market with the same concept. Patent trolls employ the concept of multiples in a perverted reverse, using the common nature of new ideas to hold all inventors hostage.
I’ve talked to entrepreneurs who tell me they’d like to talk openly online about what they’re working on. They want to harness multiples. But they’re worried that someone will take their idea and execute it more quickly than they can. “I know I’d get better feedback on my project if I wrote and tweeted about it,” one once told me, “but I can’t risk it.” This isn’t universally true; some start-up CEOs have begun trying to be more open, on the assumption that, as Bill Joy is famously reported quipping, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”22 They know that talking about a problem makes it more likely you’ll hook up with someone who has an answer.
But on balance, the commercial imperative to “own” an idea explains why public thinking has been a boon primarily for everyday people (or academics or nonprofits) pursuing their amateur passions. If you’re worried about making a profit, multiples dilute your special position in the market; they’re depressing. But if you’re just trying to improve your thinking, multiples are exciting and catalytic. Everyday thinkers online are thrilled to discover someone else with the same idea as them.
We can see this in the history of “giving credit” in social media.23 Every time a new medium for public thinking has emerged, early users set about devising cordial, Emily Post–esque protocols. The first bloggers in the late 1990s duly linked back to the sources where they’d gotten their fodder. They did it so assiduously that the creators of blogging software quickly created an automatic “trackback” tool to help automate the process. The same thing happened on Twitter. Early users wanted to hold conversations, so they began using the @ reply to indicate they were replying to someone—and then to credit the original user when retweeting a link or pithy remark. Soon the hashtag came along—like #stupidestthingivedone today or #superbowl—to create floating, ad hoc conversations. All these innovations proved so popular that Twitter made them a formal element of its service. We so value conversation and giving credit that we hack it into any system that comes along.
Stanford University English professor Andrea Lunsford is one of America’s leading researchers into how young people write. If you’re worried that college students today can’t write as well as in the past, her work will ease your mind. For example, she tracked down studies of how often first-year college 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