An interview with Clive Thompson about his book, “Smarter than you think”

Even after reading Clive Thompson’s book for the second time, still, I couldn’t convince myself to consider it as a good read for serious practitioners in the field.

I do acknowledge that I’m a bit pessimistic about the technology, but he seemed naively optimistic about it.

Anyway, he is a journalist, as he emphasizes everywhere; and a journalist is not supposed to be a deep strategic thinker. He is supposed to report what’s already happening and not what’s going to be happening.

When you have not a very positive attitude about a book, it’s not expected that an interview with the author changes your mind. However, it did happen.

Lawrence Ampofo on Digital Mindfulness has done a fascinating interview with Clive Thompson about his book, “Smarter than you think.”

There I learned that my judgment was biased about his work and now I’m going to read the book for the third time.

Here you can listen to the interview or download its file for listening later:

There are many insightful ideas discussed in the file. But I do recommend to pay extra attention to the following points:

• The role of journalists contrasted with theoretical thinkers
• The ambient awareness concept
• Social media is not supposed to be a substitute for our thinking; it’s a new communication tool for increasing our awareness. As Thompson notes, it’s fairer to compare social media with the eye-blink communications in a room, instead of criticizing its weakness as a deep-thinking discussion tool.
• Role of smileys and emoticons and animated gifs in our current communication style and comparing it to our original pre-Gutenberg style of writing.