Clive Thompson > 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

“Memory has always been social. Now we’re using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.”
― Clive Thompson

“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

“For years, coders have been programming computers so that they perform repetitive tasks for us. Now they automate our repetitive thoughts.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Research by the Harvard professor Teresa M. Amabile and researcher Steven J. Kramer has found that employees are happiest at jobs where they experience “the power of small wins”—regular, daily, visible progress.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“We’re social creatures, so we think socially.”
― 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

“the first ENIAC programmer team was all-female: Kathleen McNulty, Betty Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman, known later as the “ENIAC Girls.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“More than introversion or logic, though, coding selects for people who can handle endless frustration.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“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

“Back in the ’80s, MIT’s pioneering educational theorist Seymour Papert argued that computer programming constituted a mode of thought deeply useful to children. Much as you learn French best by living in a place where it’s spoken daily (a French land, like Paris), you learn logic and math and systematic thinking by living in a “Mathland”—which is, essentially, computer programming.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“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

“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.”
― 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

“you always take pride in your code. You should always be refactoring it, it should look like you’ve been working on it, when people see it,” he said. A single flabbily written function would convey something other than total commitment to the craft. “I’m a firm believer in the broken-windows theory. You find a bug, you hunt it down and kill it.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“Many coders were young and coming out of the already antiauthoritarian counterculture of the ’60s. When you put these kids in charge of important machines that their managers didn’t understand, it was a recipe for insolence—or, as Brandon noted, employees who were “excessively independent.” The average programmer, Brandon continued, was “often egocentric, slightly neurotic, and he borders upon a limited schizophrenia. The incidence of beards, sandals, and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity are notably greater among this demographic group.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“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

“Our minds are drawn to what feels true, not what’s necessarily so.”
― Clive Thompson

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

“Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car helps manage the braking system; “machine-learning” algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity to help spy the moment when a criminal dupes your card and starts fraudulently buying things using your money. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer—someone precisely like Ruchi Sanghvi or Mark Zuckerberg. Odds are high the person who originally thought of the product was a coder: Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things, so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible. (What if you had a computer take every word you typed and, quietly and constantly and automatically in the background, checked it against a dictionary of common English words? Hello, spell-check!) Sometimes it seems that the software we use just sort of sprang into existence, like grass growing on the lawn. But it didn’t. It was created by someone who wrote out—in code—a long, painstaking set of instructions telling the computer precisely what to do, step-by-step, to get a job done. There’s a sort of priestly class mystery cultivated around the word algorithm, but all they consist of are instructions: Do this, then do this, then do this. News Feed is now an extraordinarily complicated algorithm involving some trained machine learning; but it’s ultimately still just a list of rules. So the rule makers have power. Indeed, these days, the founders of high-tech companies—the ones who determine what products get created, what problems get solved, and what constitutes a “problem” in the first place—are increasingly technologists, the folks who cut their teeth writing endless lines of code and who cobbled together the prototype for their new firm themselves. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World