Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds For the Better
Clive Thompson
New York: Penguin, 2013

Clive Thompson is tremendously optimistic about the direction of digital culture and information technology, and this optimism is grounded in an understanding of the history of information revolutions. It takes time, he reminds us, for culture to integrate profound changes in information exchange.

“The earliest [books] were, by modern standards, practically unusable – often devoid of the navigational aids we now take for granted, such as indexed, paragraph breaks, or page numbers. It took decades – centuries, even – for the book to be redesigned into a more flexible cognitive tool, as suitable for quick reference as it is for deep reading. This is the same path we’ll need to tread with our digital tools.” (pp. 12-13)

 

 

The book begins with a parable. Many people are familiar with the stunning outcome of the 1997 Garry Kasparov-Deep Blue chess game, but less well known is what came after: Kasparov began experimenting with human-computer collaboration, combining the strengths of both to transform understanding of and approach to the game. (p 5) This is an experimentation that continues to revolutionize chess today, and it’s also a metaphor for digital culture: computers aren’t smarter than us, they’re differently smart, and they’re making us differently smart in our integration of them into our daily lives. (pp 7-9)

From the chess metaphor, he continues to recent research in human memory and of machine-assisted data storage and retrieval; to the concept of public thinking and the online explosion of personal writing; the expanding definition of literacy to embrace new media; the navigation of this sea of text- and other-based content; the fundamental human hunger for puzzles to solve and how a networked world is expanding the richness and complexity of the puzzles we can create for ourselves to solve; the impact of diverse media, geographically dispersed social networks, and self-paced, interactive educational modules on pedagogy and education reform; the role of ambient awareness in daily life and relationships; and finally to how all of these things come together to create a connected society.

New media allow us to do several things: to outsource the gruntwork of memory to machines, freeing up cognitive space to devote to a richer mental map of the information landscape (Sparrow, 2011) ; second, to integrate these informational transactions into social cognition; “Google – or your smartphone – becomes like an insanely knowledgable companion. You trust it enough to rely on as you would a spouse or nearby colleague.” (Thompson, 2013, p. 128). Third, they allow us to shift the life of the mind into tangible, sharable forms, enriching our self-awareness of our own intellectual lives and those of friends, loved ones, and strangers in a neverending global conversation, in both deep and ephemeral ways. It’s not enough to call this an information revolution; it’s an epistemological revolution, a transformation in how we know what we know.

At first, transformation is disruptive and terrifying, then an object of suspicion, then cool, and then finally it’s just culture, just part of how we interact with each other and the world. This book is ultimately about navigational literacy, which has always been the domain of libraries and librarians (pp. 204-208). Awareness of how these tools shape our very understanding of information itself is fundamental to maintaining spaces and services for information access and self-advocacy.