Every once and a while, it's important for geeks and the tech-obsessed to step away from the glow of their laptop screens and out into “meatspace.”
But first, they should let tech writer and columnist Clive Thompson make sense of what they'll find there.
Thompson is a freelance columnist for Wired magazine, and specializes in writing about the ways science and technology influence our culture – and vice versa.
Sometimes the hardest connections to draw with technology are the ways it interacts with the outside world, and this is where Thompson excels. He's written extensive pieces on the topic, like this lengthy article for New York Times Magazine explaining the way social networking and Twitter influence the relationships between people in real life.
He also appears regularly in Wired magazine, writing columns with provocative titles like “Games Give Free Rein to the Douchebag Within” – a piece in which he discusses what the in-game decisions video gamers make might say about their real-world personas.
He writes about obscure topics at times, but somehow always make a strong connection to the real world, like his piece about how playing Halo 3 online helped him realize why suicide bombing makes sense for some.
His tech commentaries are always entertaining and thought-provoking, but are much more than some computer geek's caffeine-fueled rants. Sometimes Thompson's opinion isn't even obvious in the story until halfway through, because he piles in so many facts, outside quotes and research. Doing this only helps to increase his credibility, and makes it incredibly hard to argue against any of the points he makes.
In addition to appearing in Wired, New York Times Magazine and several other tech and science publications, Thompson has been posting to his blog, Collision Detection, since 2002. He is a strong advocate of blogging and has said it helps him to keep ideas flowing in his mind – a vital process for a freelance writer.
“But more often it's inspiration and keeping my intellectual wheels greased so that I'm able to continually think of new ideas,” he told MIT's Martha Henry. “It probably makes my writing faster and looser because I'm accustomed to regularly sitting down in the evening and blogging 2000 words on four different topics.”
Although Thompson is quick to extol the ways blogging has helped his writing abilities, his blog also has an ulterior motive: making him more popular on the web.
“I wanted to establish myself as easy to find on Google,” he explained. “So I started the blog because when you're a freelancer, you don't belong to an organization. It's very hard to find you. So I needed to establish an unshakable presence.”
Thompson's blog topics are varied and somewhat scatter-brained, but he doesn't simply throw together links and accompanying posts of a couple dozen words. He said his blog started as a place for short posts like those, but in time evolved into only posting when he had “something interesting to say about it.”
“I blogged less frequently and I blogged longer little essays, things that were at least 500 words and sometimes up to 1000 words,” he told Henry. “Every posting became like a mini essay. And that's the way I still write today.”
His blog is currently the No. 1 Google result in searches for “Clive Thompson,” and it ranks in the top 20 results for “Clive.”
The more a reader is exposed to Thompson, the more obvious his extensive understanding of tech and the way it influences society becomes. He's able to see more than the obvious uses and effects of technology (a June column wonders if a video game not clearing the corpses of defeated foes affects the moral impacts on gamers), and explain them clearly to readers.
Plus, he's confident enough in his masculinity to have a cute, fluffy AOL Instant Messenger screen name: pomeranian99. Maybe next time he's online, I'll ask him about it.
[photo courtesy flickr user cambodia4kidsorg]
[video courtesy Beth Kanter]
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