Clive Thompson: I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any...

Memory has always been social. Now we're using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.

Clive Thompson

computer social memories

Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what's going on in the lives of other people - what they're thinking about, what they're doing, what they're looking at - by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online. We're now able to stitch together these fantastic details and mental maps of what is going on in other people's lives.

Clive Thompson

knowing people thinking

A huge amount of our everyday thinking - powerful, creative, and resonant stuff - is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us.

Clive Thompson

powerful talking thinking

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.

Clive Thompson

online book people

The humanitarian developers behind World of Warcraft have also discovered a way to bribe gamers into turning off their computers and going outside. If you log off for a few days, your character will be more rested when you resume playing, a mode that temporarily speeds up your leveling.

Clive Thompson

character way world

More than any other modern tool, computers are a total mystery to their users. Most people never open them up to fix them or to see how they work.

Clive Thompson

computer tools people

That's the old ecological tale that explains humans' inability to fully appreciate global warming. To wit: if you drop a frog in a pan of hot water, it jumps out. If you drop it in a pan of cold water, then turn the heat up slowly, you can roast it to death.

Clive Thompson

appreciate animal funny

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.

Clive Thompson

data opposites thinking

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

Clive Thompson

serendipity reading book

Type as quickly as you can and always carry a pencil.

Clive Thompson

pencils type

The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.

Clive Thompson

light fire reason thinking

The main message of 'Smarter Than You Think' is an attempt to look at the productively new and interesting ways that we have begun to learn about the world, to think about what we found, and to mull it over and argue about it with other people as we use technology.

Clive Thompson

look you technology people

The people who tend to get the most out of being social thinkers are the people who themselves are helpful. They're always talking or answering people's questions or engaging in productive conversations. They're not being trolls. They're tamping down other people that are being trolls.

Clive Thompson

down questions talking people

We're dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people - and, now, other machines.

Clive Thompson

less now machines people

The computer industry began with home-brew boxes that everyone had to program for themselves, but that was a huge hassle. The computer revolution didn't explode until the first Macintosh arrived, with its point-and-click simplicity.

Clive Thompson

everyone first simplicity revolution

The one complaint about the Internet that I wholeheartedly endorse is that most of these tools have been designed to peck at us like ducks: 'Hey, there's a new reply to your comment! Come look at it!'

Clive Thompson

your new look internet

We use paper documents to store knowledge so we can consult and reconsult it, giving us a type of recall impossible with our unaided minds; we use pencils to scratch down material so we can manipulate it in a fashion impossible in our unaided minds.

Clive Thompson

down fashion impossible knowledge

The amount of writing that people do online is astonishing, and historically unprecedented.

Clive Thompson

astonishing online writing people

Personally, I'd love to see more social media firms develop business models that aren't reliant on advertising. If you're a social media firm selling ads, your goal is to get people to interrupt what they're doing all day long so they come and stare at your service as much as possible.

Clive Thompson

day social-media business love

There is something about the ability to externalize our thoughts and compare them with other people in a public way that is really transformative for the average person.

Clive Thompson

thoughts person people way

I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for the people who flock there - because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social.