Clive Thompson

I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for the people who flock there - because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social. ”

Why are online games so addictive? It's mostly the narcotic appeal of 'leveling.' ”

The amount of writing that people do online is astonishing, and historically unprecedented. ”

The main message of 'Smarter Than You Think' is an attempt to look at the productively new and interesting ways that we have begun to learn about the world, to think about what we found, and to mull it over and argue about it with other people as we use technology. ”

Transactive memory works best when you have a sense of how your partners' minds work - where they're strong, where they're weak, where their biases lie. I can judge that for people close to me. But it's harder with digital tools, particularly search engines. ”

Personally, I'd love to see more social media firms develop business models that aren't reliant on advertising. If you're a social media firm selling ads, your goal is to get people to interrupt what they're doing all day long so they come and stare at your service as much as possible. ”

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 see how they work. ”

We're dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people - and, now, other machines. ”