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A revelatory and timely look at how technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever
It’s undeniable—technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding “yes.” In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But, as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what is good of the old. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.
- Sales Rank: #132149 in Books
- Published on: 2014-08-26
- Released on: 2014-08-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.35" h x .79" w x 5.50" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Booklist
In this excursion into techno-optimism, Thompson discusses computerized, interconnected social activity. Relying on journalism’s staple of the human-interest story, he describes individuals’ experiences of exploring the Internet in pursuit of their interests. In Thompson’s examples, those pursuits range from retrieving a personal memory to critiquing TV shows to finding a house for sale to researching proteins to organizing political movements. The commonalities Thompson finds among all those searches are prodigious data storage-and-retrieval capacities and the latent presence in cyberspace of someone interested in what you’re interested in. Connecting interest with information animates Thompson’s many anecdotes, whose motif of the delight felt by strangers or long-lost friends upon discovering a mutual concern propels his belief that Twitter, Facebook, and social-media sites built by amateurs positively motivate people to think and write better. To criticisms that social media degrade or isolate people, Thompson ripostes with studies or classroom examples that show improvements in learning and the creation of collaborative groups. A lively presenter with a sunny outlook, Thompson will engage readers drawn to the sociology of technology. --Gilbert Taylor
Review
“Powerful and rigorously thought out … Smarter Than You Think is excellent and necessary in its entirety, covering everything from the promise of artificial intelligence to how technology is changing our ambient awareness.”
— Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
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“[A] lucid and distinctly hopeful study of the ways in which modern tools are changing how we read, think, write, and act.” — The New Yorker
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“A well-framed celebration of how the digital world will make us bigger, rather than diminish us.”
— Kirkus
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“[A] judicious and insightful book on machine intelligence.” — Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review
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“[An] entertaining and well-researched celebration of modern communication.” —O Magazine
"We should be grateful to have such a clear-eyed and lucid interpreter of our changing technological culture as Clive Thompson. Smarter Than You Think is an important, insightful book about who we are, and who we are becoming."
—Joshua Foer, New York Times bestselling author of Moonwalking with Einstein
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"Almost without noticing it, the Internet has become our intellectual exoskeleton. Rather than just observing this evolution, Clive Thompson takes us to the people, places and technologies driving it, bringing deep reporting, storytelling and analysis to one of the most profound shifts in human history."
—Chris Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of Makers, Free, and The Long Tail
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"There's good news in this dazzling book: Technology is not the enemy.� Smarter Than You Think reports on how the digital world has helped individuals harness a powerful, collaborative intelligence—becoming better problem-solvers and more creative human beings."
—Jane McGonigal, PhD, Author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
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"Thompson declares a winner in the cognitive fight between human and computers: both together. Smarter Than You Think is an eye-opening exploration of the ways computers think better with humans attached, and vice-versa."
—Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus
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About the Author
Clive Thompson�is a contributor for the�New York Times Magazineand�Wired. He also writes for�Fast Company�and appears regularly on many NPR programs, CNN, Fox News, and NY1, among other news outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Most helpful customer reviews
62 of 68 people found the following review helpful.
Some caution is required when drawing conclusions from the findings discussed in this book
By OnceMore
The findings discussed in this book come from a wide variety of sources, ranging from scientific studies, to observed phenomena such as people coming together to get something done quickly with the help of technologies, and to anecdotes given to the author.
While many of the findings indicate that technology does have positive and useful roles to play in people's lives, in some cases, it's not clear to me whether we can categorically assert that technology has made someone smarter.
Take, for example, the observation that with the rise of software that can play chess with humans, and the increased opportunities for humans to gain chess playing knowledge and experience by playing against such software opponents, the age at which chess players are able to attain grandmastership status has also come down as well. Can we categorically conclude from such a finding that competing against chess-playing software has a causal relationship to making someone a smarter chess player sooner, as evidenced by the younger ages of recently minted grandmasters (compared to the ages of grandmasters from decades ago)? It seems to me there could be alternative explanations for such a finding.
Or take the findings that technology can help improve our memory (i.e., remember things more readily or for a longer time). While the ability to remember things is important to our ability to reason about things, memory improvements do not equate to, nor necessarily lead to, improvements in reasoning ability.
Some of the findings discussed in this book do show, however, that well-designed computer games, for example, can be used effectively to hone children's reasoning abilities, at least with respect to some domains, as evidenced by test score differences.
Overall, I think this book is worth considering. The author rambles on and digresses every now and then, and some of the evidence marshalled to support the book's main thesis (that technology is making us smarter) can be rather weak, but for the most part, the findings discussed in this book are interesting.
50 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
The Anti-Shallows...
By Joseph Ratliff
If you've read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (a great book in its own right), then you can consider this book on the 180-degree opposite end of the spectrum.
This book by Clive Thompson investigates technology from the standpoint of the positive aspects as it applies to your life and mind.
And I have to say, both books present their case well. I thoroughly enjoyed Clive's engaging writing style (Nicholas is more "academic"). He even mixes a little humor into the book.
If you're interested in the "effects of technology on the mind" I highly recommend this book.
Why not 5 stars?
I think the author could have backed up his case a little bit better by approaching the book in a more academic way, while sticking to his engaging writing style. Not that this book lacks research by any means, it just could have been less "RAH RAH, technology" and more "this is exactly why what I'm saying is proven."
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
A thesis worth considering, a book worth reading
By Brian W. Fairbanks
In his memoir, The Measure of a Man, Sidney Poitier compared his quiet childhood on Cat Island in the Bahamas with the noisy, technology driven world in which urban kids grow up today. "We put our kids through fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?"
In Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson acknowledges that argument. "Some people panic that our brains are being deformed on a physiological level by today's technology," he writes. At the same time, he believes that the concern that technology is rewiring our brains is premature and that "it is rash to draw conclusions, either apocalyptic or utopian."
The author does not concern himself with the way our brains are possibly being "rewired" ("Almost everything rewires it, including this book"), but instead focuses on how our intellects are being improved when our brains work in tandem with technology.
Our memories, faultier than we like to believe, are strengthened by technology's ability to record events through video, email, texts, and with cell phone cameras and recording devices. It's easier than ever to preserve the past. As Thompson writes, "in 1981, a gigabyte of memory cost roughly three hundred thousand dollars, but now it can be had for pennies."
Some of the people interviewed are so obsessive about recording as much as possible that they are called "lifeloggers." One wonders, certainly I do, if all this recording for future reference hinders the ability to fully experience life in the present?
In Thompson's view, the present is preferable to the past whose glories are more imagined than real. Before the Internet, the average person only wrote as a requirement in the classroom. Now there are blogs, discussion boards, fan fiction, emails, texts - Amazon customer reviews like this one - "a foaming Niagara of writing." It may be "an ocean of dreck, dotted sporadically by islands of genius," but he agrees with Theodore Sturgeon's observation that "Ninety percent of everything is crap." Regardless of its quality, all this writing "can help clarify our thinking."
Technology is not only changing traditional reading and writing, but creating new forms of literacy. Everything from movies and television to politics is changing, often for the better. In the past, moving images moved too fast for careful analysis. Now anyone can pause video, scan it frame-by-frame, re-edit the contents and post it online. "No sooner does a politician make an appearance on television than political junkies and activists have scanned in the video, uploaded it, clipped out statements, and begun debating what was said."
Technology is also helping to create social change as people connect with each other online and organize for action.
The possibilities are endless, and Thompson believes that they have yet to be tapped. "We're not thinking big enough, or weird enough. A tool's most transformative uses generally take us by surprise."
That may be the problem. How will all this technology be used to threaten our freedom and ability to think and make decisions for ourselves especially if someone "weird enough" is at the switch? Thompson acknowledges the dangers. "Like all new tools," he writes," we'll also have to negotiate how not to use it."
I don't know if all this technology is really making us Smarter Than You Think, but Thompson argues convincingly in favor of his thesis and even a skeptic like myself believes it is worth considering.
Brian W. Fairbanks
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