Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

It's undeniableâ€”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 deeperâ€”both as individuals and as a society.
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In Smarter Than You Think Thompson shows that every technological innovationâ€”from the written word to the printing press to the telegraphâ€”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 adaptâ€”learning to use the new and retaining whatâ€™s good of the old.
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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 momentâ€”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 decadeâ€”and solved it collaboratively in only one month.
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Smarter Than You Think isn't just about pioneers. It's about everyday users of technology and how our digital toolsâ€”from Google to Twitter to Facebook and smartphonesâ€”are giving us new ways to learn, talk, and share our ideas. Thompson harnesses the latest discoveries in social science to explore how digital technology taps into our long-standing habits of mindâ€”pushing them in powerful new directions. Our thinking will continue to evolve as newer tools enter our lives. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.
Country USA
Manufacturer Penguin Books
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2013-09-12
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Penguin Books
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2013-09-12
Format	Kindle eBook

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

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