Sunday, January 10, 2016

TOW #14 - Faking It

     Faking It is an excerpt from Michael Lewis's book Next: The Future Just Happened, written on the Internet-triggered "status revolution" that gave unprecedented power to the amateur. (Even if the name Michael Lewis does not immediately ring a bell, his Oscar-nominated titles "The Blind Side" and "Moneyball" may provide him with some credibility as a skilled storyteller.) The article presents the story of Marcus Arnold, whose fifteen minutes of fame in 2001 stemmed from the then-15-year-old's profile as the #3-ranked criminal law expert on AskMe.com. Lewis presents a compelling commentary on the Internet's effects on the previously "privileged" status of information as a three-in-one story, interview, and social report.
     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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