Smarter Than You Think (2013) Clive Thompson [mobi/epub/azw3]

Format: mobi/epub/azw3
Length: 352 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction/Technology
Date: 12 September 2013

From the 'Wired' and 'New York Times Magazine' contributor, a brilliant examination into how the internet is profoundly changing the way we think.

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." The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and analysis. We learn more and retain it longer, write and think with global audiences, and even gain an ESP-like awareness of the world around us. Modern technology is making us smarter, better connected, and often deeper?both as individuals and as a society.

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's good of the old.

Thompson introduces us to a cast of extraordinary characters who augment their minds in inventive ways. There's the seventy-six-year old millionaire who digitally records his every waking moment - giving him instant recall of the events and ideas of his life, even going back decades. There's a group of courageous Chinese students who mounted an online movement that shut down a $1.6 billion toxic copper plant. There are experts and there are amateurs, including a global set of gamers who took a puzzle that had baffled HIV scientists for a decade - and solved it collaboratively in only one month.

Author:

Clive Thompson is a Canadian freelance journalist, blogger and science and technology writer. He writes about digital technologies and their social and cultural impact for a number of publications, including the New York Times Magazine and Wired. In 2002, he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.