Nicholas G. Carr

Nicholas G. Carr (born 1959) is an American writer who has published books and articles on technology, business, and culture. His book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

Nicholas Carr originally came to prominence with the 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" and the 2004 book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business School Press). In these widely discussed works, he argued that the strategic importance of information technology in business has diminished as IT has become more commonplace, standardized and cheaper. His ideas roiled the information technology industry, spurring heated outcries from executives of Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and other leading technology companies, although the ideas got mixed responses from other commentators. In 2005, Carr published the controversial article "The End of Corporate Computing" in the MIT Sloan Management Review, in which he argued that in the future companies will purchase information technology as a utility service from outside suppliers.

Carr's second book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published in January 2008 by W. W. Norton. It examines the economic and social consequences of the rise of Internet-based "cloud computing" comparing the consequences to those that occurred with the rise of electric utilities in the early 20th century.

In the summer of 2008, The Atlantic published Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" as the cover story of its annual Ideas issue. Highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition, the article has been read and debated widely in both the media and the blogosphere. Carr's main argument is that the Internet may have detrimental effects on cognition that diminish the capacity for concentration and contemplation.

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