Clive Thompson Quotes

19 quotes in 359 categories

• 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…
• Memory has always been social. Now we're using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.
• 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…
• 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.…
• When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity.
• Type as quickly as you can and always carry a pencil.
• 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…
• A huge amount of our everyday thinking - powerful, creative, and resonant stuff - is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying…
• We use paper documents to store knowledge so we can consult and reconsult it, giving us a type of recall impossible with our unaided minds;…
• The amount of writing that people do online is astonishing, and historically unprecedented.
• There is something about the ability to externalize our thoughts and compare them with other people in a public way that is really transformative for…
• Tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is when people almost remember something but need a computer, or someone else, to help them find it. The problem is, our brains…
• Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a…
• Insurance firms have always carefully studied real-world data to figure out what, precisely, constitutes a risky activity.
• America has always had tinkerers, including just about any teenager who ever hot-rodded a Camaro.
• The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result.
• Truly huge artistic collaboration on the Internet seems to work only if the gang has a well-defined objective.
• 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…
• No consumer product improves more drastically, year after year, than the computer.

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