Exploring Thompson

In response to Thompson’s chapter Public Thinking a few questions to ask Thompson pop into my head. First off a lot of new technology has enabled poor spelling habits due to spell check and short hands due to texting is a lot of poor writing better than fewer better writing? Next with this new technologies to post anything at anytime how do you propose we fix the issue of how hard it is to determine if something is truthful and a real fact compared to falsified documents?

            One argument I found very persuasive was his argument that writing is very beneficial to get ones ideas out. For me it is very hard to start writing and I do find it interesting to just write and see what comes out to see what I am thinking no filtering and editing just free response. Another argument that he makes is that writing is a great way to help understand what is going on around the country and around the world. Now a days we don’t need to read day old newspapers and hear things from the grapevine. We can go online and see a video of an event happening live, and live tweets about things that are happening everywhere.  One argument I did not find very persuasive was the one about numbers and how much writing everyone does everyday, as a solid claim as to how much writing is happening al the time, because this could be just ones that are posted or ones that are done by college students posting for homework. It does not necessarily mean that everyone is more into writing now and that writing during ones free time everyone does.

            I think Thompson opens with a story about a Kenyan blogger, Ory Okolloh, to connect with readers as an example of an every day person who just posts online about things that are happening in her life. She is not a journalist and this is not part of her job it is just a hobby she enjoy. This example connects really well with his claims about how writing is now something that happens as a causal pass time that is very important. Even though Okolloh did not realize it she started to get a lot of followers and people relied on her blogs for information during a time when information about government and everyday life in Kenya was hard to get. Another claim Thompson makes is that we do not realize how much we are writing when we are writing since it has become such a common ting to do. This was shown with Okolloh when she said she could never write a book when a publisher asked her to because she said that is way too much writing to do, but then he printed out all of her blog posts and it was the size of two textbooks.