Last weekend I attended Minnesota Public Radio’s Top Coast Festival, a conference on politics, pop culture, health care, technology, food and philanthropy. There were two talks I wanted to highlight here: Aneesh Chopra and Clive Thompson. Mostly for the sake of archive, I’ll do this in two posts. (The talks will be broadcast in MPR over the next few weeks. I’m afraid I can’t find a detailed schedule – I’ll add a link if/when I do find it.)

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired. He wrote Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. He is also in a Bluegrass band that does 80s covers. Thompson was interviewed by Neal Justin. The talked about the impact technology is having on users. Fascinating!

Thompson observed that the greatest danger of smartphone technology and status update culture is the focus on now. We are losing interest in our history and to some degree in our future when all we see and all we do is catalog and memorialize the now. What’s funny is that at the same time people are complaining that we’re too focused on the now – they also that we’re not focused on the here. We’re focused on our screens. Thompson, who backed almost everything he said with a study, added that while it seems like people are focused on their phones, studies show it isn’t true. People observed in social settings do not generally spend much time on their phone. He added that it just seems that way, especially if the notion of it bugs the observer.

He did add that while we might not be focused on our phones, we aren’t always present either but paying attention is teachable; we just need to be more mindful of it as a goal. Sometimes changing the format or platform of work can help. So going from a device to writing in pen can provide cause your brain to change its approach.

Another interesting observation comes of those who say “this generation is killing culture!” Nearly every generation has said it about the upcoming generations and people have been saying it about new technology for as long. Back in the day, people were worried that the pen would ruin public discourse and memorization. And to some degree it probably did. But what the naysayers don’t understand is that each new technology opens a new door too

Studies have shown that the workforce is more productive with technology; the problem is that industry has reaped most of the benefits of that productivity. We are now tethered to our office via our devices and smartphones. So at the end of the day does that tethering make us smarter than the phones or vice versa? Time will tell. As Thompson points out, we are really in the infancy of a new way of doing things!