Smart or Teched

You Are Not So Smart

Is all this new technology improving our smart thinking or dampening it? Are all these new communication tools turning us into navel-gazing human/brand hybrids of Smart people, or are we developing a new set of senses that allow us to benefit from never severing contact with the people most important to us? Are we teched?

That’s the topic of this Audiocast from the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, and to answer these questions we welcome the episode’s guest, Clive Thompson, who is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. As the title suggests, he disagrees with the naysayers, and his book is an impressive investigation into why they are probably (thankfully) wrong. Thompson is a journalist whose work can be found published in Wired, The Washington Post, and the New York Times Magazine. You can learn more about him at his website, CollisionDetection.Net.

After the interview, I discuss a news story about research into how the way you walk can encourage or discourage criminals to attack you.