Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what’s going on in the lives of other people — what they’re thinking about, what they’re doing, what they’re looking at — by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online. We’re now able to stitch together these fantastic details and mental maps of what is going on in other people’s lives.

— Clive Thompson

As Lee Rainier and Barry Hellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.

— Clive Thompson

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.

— Clive Thompson

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

— Clive Thompson

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.

— 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.

— Clive Thompson

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.

— Clive Thompson

We use paper documents to store knowledge so we can consult and recons ult 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.

— Clive Thompson

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.

— Clive Thompson