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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.

In 2005, Carr published the controversial [4] 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.

Through his blog "Rough Type," Carr has been a critic of technological utopianism and in particular the populist claims made for online social production. In his 2005 blog essay titled "The Amorality of Web 2.0," he criticized the quality of volunteer Web 2.0 information projects such as Wikipedia and the blogosphere and argued that they may have a net negative effect on society by displacing more expensive professional alternatives.

I think Carr’s premises are correct:  the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought.

there are a host of people, from mathematicians to jazz musicians, who practice kinds of deep thought that are perfectly distinguishable from deep reading.

in either the availability or comprehension of material on scientific or technical subjects

spoken language is an evolutionary adaptation, but written language, in every form from cuneiform to unicode, is a technology, so there’s no written mode that isn’t under some sway or other.

Kittler says the typewriter made Nietzsche’s work more aphoristic, but Nietzsche was always an aphoristic writer, so was this a perversion or a purification of his style?

The way that the Internet is designed—not graphic design, but overall habits and architecture—encourages the widespread distractability that I, at least, hate.

I learned it from Nicholas Carr

Interconnectivity: information that is of some inherent public interest is typically marinated in meta-information: (a) is bathed in (b). It is not enough to make the inherently interesting content instantly available and easy to find; it must also be surrounded by links, sidebars, menus, and other info, and promoted on social media via mail. This is deliberate, but it has gotten worse in the last ten years or so, with the advent of syndicated blog feeds (RSS), then various other social media feeds. This is, of course, supposed to be for the convenience and enlightenment of the user, and no doubt sometimes it is. But I think it usually doesn’t help anybody, except maybe people who are trying to build web traffic. Recency: the information to be most loudly announced online is not just recent, but the brand-spanking-newest, and what allegedly deserves our attention now is determined democratically, with special weight given to the opinions of people we know.

Nicholas Carr, now best known for “The Shallows,” a book critical of the Internet, said the Kindle would never succeed because, unlike the iPod, there was little content available for it.

The initial e-book explosion is starting to look like an aberration. The technology's early adopters, a small but enthusiastic bunch, made the move to e-books quickly and in a concentrated period.

the shift from e-readers to tablets may also be dampening e-book purchases

The fact that an e-book can't be sold or given away after it's read also reduces the perceived value of the product.

the heaviest buyers of e-books are now buying more, not fewer, printed books

Clay Shirky

Not once in that half century has anyone successfully invented anything that feels like the digital version of a book. Books online, whether in a Kindle or Google Books, are always (cue McLuhan) the old medium populating the new.

Using brain scans, the researchers compared the brains of 18 adolescents who spend around eight to twelve hours a day online (playing games, mainly) with the brains of 18 adolescents who spend less than 2 hours a day online. The heavy Net users exhibited gray-matter "atrophy" as well as other "abnormalities," and the changes appeared to grow more severe the longer the kids engaged in intensive Net use.

Technological progress is not a force of cosmic goodness, and it is surely not a force of cosmic love. It's an entirely earthly force, as suspect as the flawed humans whose purposes it suits.

Más información, menos conocimiento

Lo que significa, si él tiene razón, que la robotización de una humanidad organizada en función de la "inteligencia artificial" es imparable. A menos, claro, que un cataclismo nuclear, por obra de un accidente o una acción terrorista, nos regrese a las cavernas. Habría que empezar de nuevo, entonces, y a ver si esta segunda vez lo hacemos mejor.

The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement.

The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces.

To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something's got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.

Carr's concern about the impact of the Internet on the way we think isn't misplaced. Small's research and other studies make it clear that the information explosion and the tools we employ to contain it affect cognition. But it will take time before it's clear whether we should mourn the old ways, celebrate the new, or learn to stop worrying and love the Net.