One way that Lewis
constructs an emotionally engaging piece is through a generous use of
narration, regarding his own life and Marcus's adventures. He transitions into
the central story using in anecdote about his father's firsthand experience as
a lawyer in a time of super-commercialization and the Internet. He also
includes bits of dialogue from Marcus and his parents to better portray the
teen's genuine obliviousness to how amazing his story was.
Similarly, he uses
imagery to make ideas easy to visualize and understand. He describes the
increased accessibility of information as "[making] life harder for
pyramids and easier for pancakes," with respect to company power
structures. He also describes the youth obsession with the Internet as an
antiparallel to "the way adults often use their pasts. The passage of time
allows older people to remember who they were as they would like to have been.
Young people… imagine themselves into some future adult world." His
various insights are all very thought-provoking and clearly support his thesis
of how the technology revolution is so youth-empowering.
Lewis's writing
reaches out to an unbounded audience, asking and answering, "What is the
wider society's instinctive attitude toward knowledge? Are we willing to look
for it wherever it might be found or only from the people who are supposed to
possess it?" As an adult reader, the take-away is simply to realize that things are changing, and that sometimes giving up power to kids
and "amateurs" can be a good thing. As a younger reader, it's an
almost inspirational piece that shows kids are capable of more than realized,
and that present times are perfectly structured to facilitate exploration of
their potential.
"[Marcus] was the kind of person high school is designed to suppress... he had refused to accept his assigned status. The Internet offered him... the opportunity for new sorts of self-perceptions, which then took on a reality all their own."
*Note that article's Marcus Arnold actually passed away in 2005 from diabetes complications.
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