A review by lindseysparks
Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

3.0

It was nice reading something about technology that focused on the positive aspects without worshipping it. Thompson writes about how technology has made us smarter and how every time there's a massive tech shift people freak out about how we're getting dumber as a result, including when print books took off. This was written a couple of years ago and I would be interested to see if his opinions have changed at all based on this election cycle. He argues that social media has exposed us to more viewpoints and to discussions about topics we don't normally discuss. I didn't necessarily agree with him on a lot of things, but this book provided a lot of info on interesting studies on how we think and process information. One of the areas where I did agree with me is that we need to teach people how to better evaluate and search for info. This is even more relevant now with all of the fake news sites and misinformation and the crazy number of people who share articles without even reading it. A friend recently said we have a headline culture, which is so true. People just yell thing they see in headlines and can't say anything past that. And they think they are informed! And now we're ending up with Google and Facebook trying to control information, which is just going to make things worse. People need critical thinking and analytical skills so they can parse info themselves, not rely on someone else to do it for them.