Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
once he’d researched a question and pounded out a few paragraphs, he could use the answer as the seed for a new post. In barely one year he’d answered over twelve hundred questions and written about ninety thousand words. I tell him that’s the length of a good-sized nonfiction hardcover book, and, as with Ory Okolloh and her two telephone books’ worth of online writing, he seems stunned.
Public thinking is powerful, but it’s hard to do. It’s work. Sure, you get the good—catalyzing multiples, learning from the feedback. But it can be exhausting. Digital tools aren’t magical pixie dust that makes you smarter. The opposite is true: they give up the rewards only if you work hard and master them, just like the cognitive tools of previous generations.
But as it turns out, there are structures that can make public thinking easier—and even irresistible.
Question answering is a powerful example. In the 1990s, question-answering sites like Answerbag.com began to emerge; by now there are scores of them. The sheer volume of questions answered is remarkable:35 over one billion questions have been answered at the English version of Yahoo Answers, with one study finding the average answerer has written about fifty-one replies. In Korea, the search engine Naver set up shop in 1999 but realized there weren’t very many Korean-language Web sites in existence, so it set up a question-answering forum, which became one of its core offerings. (And since all those questions are hosted in a proprietary database36 that Google can’t access, Naver has effectively sealed Google out from the country, a neat trick.) Not all the answers, or questions, are good; Yahoo Answers in particular has become the butt of jokes for hosting spectacularly illiterate queries (“I CAN SMELL EVERYTHING MASSIVE HEAD ACHE?”) or math students posting homework questions, hoping they’ll be answered. (They usually are.) But some, like Quora, are known for cultivating thought-provoking questions and well-written answers. One of my favorite questions was “Who is history’s greatest badass,37 and why?”—which provoked a twenty-two-thousand-word rush of answers, one of which described former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt being shot by a would-be assassin before a speech and then, bleeding profusely, continuing to give the 1.5-hour-long address.
Why do question sites produce such outpourings of answers? It’s because the format is a clever way of encouraging people to formalize and share knowledge. People walk around with tons of information and wisdom in their heads but with few outlets to show it off. Having your own Web site is powerful, but comparatively few people are willing to do the work. They face the blank-page problem. What should I say? Who cares what I say? In contrast, when you see someone asking a question on a subject you know about, it catalyzes your desire to speak up.
“Questions are a really useful service for curing writer’s block,” as Charlie Cheever, the soft-spoken cofounder of Quora,38 tells me. “You might think you want to start a blog, but you wind up being afraid to write a blog post because there’s this sense of, who asked you?” Question answering provides a built-in, instant audience of at least one—the original asker. This is another legacy of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, in which Socrates asks questions of his debating partners (often faux-naive, concern-trolling ones, of course) and they pose questions of him in turn. Web authors long ago turned this into a literary form that has blossomed: the FAQ, a set of mock-Socratic questions authors pose to themselves as a way of organizing information.
It’s an addictive habit, apparently. Academic research into question-answering sites has found that answering begets answering:39 people who respond to questions are likely to stick around for months and answer even more. Many question-answering sites have a psychological architecture of rewards, such as the ability of members to give positive votes (or award “points”) for good answers. But these incentives may be secondary to people’s altruism and the sheer joy of helping people out, as one interview survey of Naver users discovered. The Naver users said that once they stumbled across a question that catalyzed their expertise, they were hooked; they couldn’t help responding. “Since I was a doctor, I was browsing the medical directories. I found a lot of wrong answers and information and was afraid they would cause problems,” as one Naver contributor said. “So I thought I’d contribute in fixing it, hoping that it’d be good for the society.” Others found that the act of writing answers helped organize their own thoughts—the generation effect in a nutshell. “My first intention [in answering] was to organize and review my knowledge and practice it by explaining it to others,” one explained.
These sites have formalized question answering as a vehicle for public thinking, but they didn’t invent it. In almost any online community, answering questions frequently forms the backbone of conversation, evolving on a grassroots level. Several years ago while reading YouBeMom, an anonymous forum for mothers, I noticed that users had created a clever inversion of the question-answering format: a user would post a description of their job and ask if anyone had questions. The ploy worked in both directions, encouraging people to ask questions they might never have had the opportunity to ask. The post “ER nurse here—questions?” turned into a sprawling discussion, hundreds of postings long, about the nurse’s bloodiest accidents, why gunshot attacks were decreasing, and how ballooning ER costs are destroying hospital budgets. (An even more spellbinding conversation emerged the night a former prostitute opened up the floor for questions.) Though it’s hard to say where it emerged, the “I am a …” format has become, like the FAQ, another literary genre the Internet has ushered into being; on the massive discussion board Reddit, there are dozens of “IAmA” threads started each day by everyone from the famous (the comedian Louis C.K., Barack Obama) to people with intriguing experiences (“IAmA Female Vietnam Veteran”; “IAmA former meth lab operator”; “IAmA close friend of Charlie Sheen since 1985”).
I’m focusing on question answering, but what’s really at work here is what publisher and technology thinker Tim O’Reilly calls the “architecture of participation.”40 The future of public thinking hinges on our ability to create tools that bring out our best: that encourage us to organize our thoughts, create audiences, make connections. Different forms encourage different styles of talk.
Microblogging created a torrent of public thinking by making a virtue of its limits. By allowing people to write only 140 characters at a time, Twitter neatly routed around the “blank page” problem: everybody can think of at least that many words to say. Facebook provoked a flood of writing by giving users audiences composed of people they already knew well from the offline world, people they knew cared about what they had to say. Texting offered a style of conversation that was more convenient than voice calls (and cheaper, in developing countries), and the asynchronicity created pauses useful for gathering your thoughts (or waiting until your boss’s back was turned so you could sneak in a conversation). One size doesn’t fit all, cognitively speaking. I know people who engage in arguments about music or politics with friends on Facebook because it’s an extension of offline contact, while others find the presence of friends claustrophobic; they find it more freeing and stimulating to talk with comparative strangers on open-ended discussion boards.
Clearly, public speech can be enormously valuable. But what about the stuff that isn’t? What about the repellent public speech? When you give everyday people the ability to communicate, you release not just brilliant bons mots and incisive conversations, but also ad hominem attacks, fury, and “trolls”—people who jump into discussion threads solely to destabilize them. The combination of distance and pseudonymity (or sometimes total anonymity) can unlock people’s worst behavior, giving them license to say brutal things they’d never say to someone’s face.
This abuse isn’t evenly distributed. It’s much less often directed at men, particularly white men like me. In contrast, many women I know—probably most—find that being public online inevitably attracts a wave of comments, ranging from dismissal to assessments of their appearance to flat-out rape threats. This is particularly true if they’re talking about anything controversial or political. Or even intellectual: “An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet,” as Laurie Penny, a British political writer, puts it. This abuse is also heaped on blacks and other minorities in the United States, or any subordinated group. Even across lines of party politics, discussion threads quickly turn