Smarter Than You Think Quotes

“When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“One of the great challenges of today’s digital thinking tools is knowing when not to use them, when to rely on the powers of older and slower technologies, like paper and books.”
― The Penguin Press, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions. This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it. You have a lot of opinions. I’m sure some of them you hold strongly. Pick one and write it up in a post—I’m sure your opinion will change somewhat, or at least become more nuanced. When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.”
― The Penguin Press, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“We know that reading changes the way we think. Among other things, it helps us formulate thoughts that are more abstract, categorical, and logical.”
― The Penguin Press, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“generating text yourself “requires more cognitive effort than does reading, and effort increases memorability,”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Today we have something that works in the same way, but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid. It’s now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together. Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.”
― The Penguin Press, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“In 1981, a gigabyte of memory cost roughly three hundred thousand dollars, but now it can be had for pennies.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“We’re social creatures, so we think socially.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Why would the same ideas occur to different people at the same time? Ogburn and Thomas argued that it was because our ideas are, in a crucial way, partly products of our environment. They’re “inevitable.” When they’re ready to emerge, they do. This is because we, the folks coming up with the ideas, do not work in a sealed-off, Rodin’s Thinker fashion.”
― The Penguin Press, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Thompson, Clive, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Each new tool for communication has provoked panic that society will devolve into silly chatter.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“The more you open up,” he says to me, “the more you reduce the need for people to send you messages.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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. • • •”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“First,”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Hobbesian individualism;”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“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:”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“symbiotic”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better