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.

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.

Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.

Writing about things has other salutary cognitive effects. For one, it improves your memory: write about something and you’ll remember it better, in what’s known as the “generation effect.

We’re social creatures, so we think socially.

But studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.

Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.

A newspaper runs a story, a friend posts a link on Facebook, a blogger writes a post, and it’s interesting. But the real intellectual action often takes place in the comments.

Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.

A huge amount of our everyday thinking – powerful, creative, and resonant stuff – is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us.