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Glen Welch
Professor Bryan Avelar
RWS 100
12/14/2016
Joining and Expanding the Conversation Regarding New Technology
As time passes, new innovations give writers all sorts of mediums through which they
can produce content. Clive Thompson, a freelance writer who has contributed to the New York
Times Magazine and Wired, argues that these new innovations will benefit society and its
writers. In the excerpt, Public Thinking, from his book Smarter Than You Think (Penguin Press
2013), Thompson’s goal is to convince his readers that the technological advances that have
given writers more platforms to write are a good thing. These technological advances, in turn,
has led to increasingly high levels in production of writing. Some writers, however, have
disagreed with Thompson claims. For example, in his work, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”,
prominent American author Nicholas Carr argues boldly that the new inventions that humankind
craves actually bring with them a host of negative effects that are hurting the brainpower of its
consumers. Carr claims that new technological advances are affecting the minds of the human
race in such a way that we are becoming unable to access the deeper levels of thought and focus
that we once were. His claim is incredibly significant because, should he be right, it would point
to the larger issue of a decline in overall human intelligence. In this piece, I aim to compare and
contrast the different views and strategies of four important pieces that are related to Thompson’s
piece: Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Danah Boyd’s “Literacy: Are Today’s
Youths Digital Natives?”, Paul La Farge’s “The Deep Space of Digital Reading: Why we
Shouldn’t Worry about Leaving Print behind”, and Ferris Jabr’s “The Reading Brain in the
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Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”. In Danah Boyd’s, “Literacy: Are Today’s
Youths Digital Natives?”, Boyd contests the idea that all of today’s youth are technologically
savvy. Boyd also points to the issue of instructors not allowing today’s youth the access to
inaccurate and problematic digital information which is a problem because it keeps the youth
from being able to figure it out for themselves. In Paul La Farge’s, “The Deep Space of Digital
Reading: Why we Shouldn’t Worry about Leaving Print behind”, La Farge contests claims made
by Clive Thompson. According to La Farge, new technology is making it so that people devalue
the benefits of reading physical books on the human mind. In Ferris Jabr’s, “The Reading Brain
in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”, Jabr argues that the mediums through
which digital natives read don’t create the tactile experiences of reading on paper.
Though the three contesting viewpoints make it seem like Thompson’s claims are false, I
