Smarter Than You Think Clive Thompson Quotes

When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity.

Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.

Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.

generating text yourself “requires more cognitive effort than does reading, and effort increases memorability,

A newspaper runs a story, a friend posts a link on Facebook, a blogger writes a post, and it’s interesting. But the real intellectual action often takes place in the comments.

As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.

We’re social creatures, so we think socially.

In 1981, a gigabyte of memory cost roughly three hundred thousand dollars, but now it can be had for pennies.

Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.

Writing about things has other salutary cognitive effects. For one, it improves your memory: write about something and you’ll remember it better, in what’s known as the “generation effect.

But studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.

The meme kept galloping along online, mocking the government anew with each variation. The joke wasn’t just that the government and its supporters were corrupt. It was that they were inept for presuming forged photos would go undetected in a visually literate age.

PowerPoint presentations, the cesspool of data visualization that Microsoft has visited upon the earth. PowerPoint, indeed, is a cautionary tale in our emerging data literacy. It shows that tools matter: Good ones help us think well and bad ones do the opposite. Ever since it was first released in 1990, PowerPoint has become an omnipresent tool for showing charts and info during corporate presentations.

While reading Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on “popular highlights” to see what passages other readers had found interesting—and wound up becoming fascinated by a section on chess strategy I’d only lightly skimmed myself.

Microsoft is still living down its disastrous introduction of Clippy, a ghastly piece of artificial intelligence - I'm using that term very loosely - that would observe people's behavior as they worked on a document and try to bust in, offering 'advice' that tended to be spectacularly useless

First,

Hobbesian individualism;

retentiveness,

symbiotic

Consider these current rough estimates: Each day, we compose 154 billion e-mails, more than 500 million tweets on Twitter, and over 1 million blog posts and 1.3 million blog comments on WordPress alone. On Facebook, we write about 16 billion words per day. That’s just in the United States:

The brain you had before you read this paragraph? You don’t get that brain back. I’m hoping the trade-off is worth it. • • •

Each new tool for communication has provoked panic that society will devolve into silly chatter.

And e-mail has indeed become one of the banes of corporate existence. Office workers spend an estimated 28 percent of the workweek writing and reading the stuff, a load that’s growing by 7 percent a year.

The more you open up,” he says to me, “the more you reduce the need for people to send you messages.

In 1934, he wrote an essay envisioning a great compendium of electronic documents that could be accessed via a computer in your household: a reseau, or “web.” “Here, the workspace is no longer cluttered with any books. In their place, a screen and a telephone within reach,” Otlet wrote. “Over there, in an immense edifice, are all the books and information. From there, the page to be read . . . is made to appear on the screen. The screen could be divided in half, by four, or even by ten, if multiple texts and documents had to be consulted simultaneously.

the odd paradoxes and trade-offs we’ll live with in a world of infinite memory. Our ancestors learned how to remember; we’ll learn how to forget.

In 1980, essayist Clara Claiborne Park wrote a lament for the demise of memorization. (At the time, the villains were pocket calculators and TelePrompTers.) Park feared that creativity would suffer.

Indeed, as a mechanism for finding knowledge, weak-link networks occupy a cognitive role usefully different from, say, search engines. While Google is useful at quickly answering a specific factual question, networks of people are better at fuzzy, “any-idea-how-to-deal-with-this?” dilemmas that occupy everyday life.