Clive Thompson

The genius idea of industrialism was the concept of the Model T: In exchange for something cheap and well-made, we'd forgo unique, lovely design.

When you're an expert in a subject, you can retain new factoids on your favorite topic easily. This only works for the subjects you're truly passionate about, though. Baseball fans can reel off stats for their favorite players, then space out on their own birthday.

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; we use pencils to scratch down material so we can manipulate it in a fashion impossible in our unaided minds.

The humanitarian developers behind World of Warcraft have also discovered a way to bribe gamers into turning off their computers and going outside. If you log off for a few days, your character will be more 'rested' when you resume playing, a mode that temporarily speeds up your leveling.

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.

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 offline; they__e just, well, social people.

Memory has always been social. Now we__e using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.

Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what__ going on in the lives of other people _ what they__e thinking about, what they__e doing, what they__e looking at _ by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online. We__e now able to stitch together these fantastic details and mental maps of what is going on in other people__ lives.

It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you _ that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.