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Clive Thompson Quotes

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

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

Clive Thompson
Memories, Computer, Social

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
Thinking, Knowing, People

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, Thinking, Talking
"Interview: Clive Thompson's 'Smarter Than You Think'". Interview with Michael Agger, www.newyorker.com. October 29, 2013.

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
Thinking, Opposites, Data
Clive Thompson (2013). “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better”, p.56, Penguin

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
People, Tools, Computer

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
Book, People, Online
Clive Thompson (2013). “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better”, p.127, Penguin

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

Clive Thompson
Type, Pencils

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, World, Way

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

Clive Thompson
Book, Reading, Serendipity

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
Funny, Animal, Appreciate

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