Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as The Big Switch and Does IT Matter? His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and the New Republic, and he writes the widely read blog Rough Type. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and an executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.
"A thought provoking exploration of the Internet’s physical and
cultural consequences, rendering highly technical material
intelligible to the general reader."
*The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Committee*
"A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Web’s
deleterious effects on the mind."
*Newsweek*
"Starred Review. Carr provides a deep, enlightening examination of
how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways.
Carr’s analysis incorporates a wealth of neuroscience and other
research, as well as philosophy, science, history and cultural
developments ... His fantastic investigation of the effect of the
Internet on our neurological selves concludes with a very
humanistic petition for balancing our human and computer
interactions ... Highly recommended."
*Library Journal*
"This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing
attention span, he’s careful to note the usefulness of the
Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of
information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows,
but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean."
*Jonah Lehrer - The New York Times Book Review*
"The best book I read last year — and by “best” I really just mean
the book that made the strongest impression on me — was The
Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. Like most people, I had some strong
intuitions about how my life and the world have been changing in
response to the Internet. But I could neither put those intuitions
into an argument, nor be sure that they had any basis in the first
place. Carr persuasively — and with great subtlety and beauty —
makes the case that it is not only the content of our thoughts that
are radically altered by phones and computers, but the structure of
our brains — our ability to have certain kinds of thoughts and
experiences. And the kinds of thoughts and experiences at stake are
those that have defined our humanity. Carr is not a proselytizer,
and he is no techno-troglodyte. He is a profoundly sharp thinker
and writer — equal parts journalist, psychologist, popular science
writer, and philosopher. I have not only given this book to
numerous friends, I actually changed my life in response to
it."
*Jonathan Safran Foer*
"This is a lovely story well told—an ode to a quieter, less
frenetic time when reading was more than skimming and thought was
more than mere recitation."
*San Francisco Chronicle*
"The Shallows isn’t McLuhan’s Understanding Media, but the
curiosity rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the
effects of online culture pulls him well into line with his
predecessor . . . Carr’s ability to crosscut between cognitive
studies involving monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of
the modern computer opens a line of inquiry into the relationship
between human and technology."
*Ellen Wernecke, - The Onion A.V. Club*
"The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is
Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition
of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was
corrupting the nation’s youth ... But this is no such book. It is a
patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being
done at the frontiers of brain science ... Mild-mannered, never
polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his
points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition."
*Christopher Caldwell - Financial Times*
"Nicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you
can stay off the web long enough to read it!"
*Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man,
Nature, and Climate Change*
"Neither a tub-thumpingly alarmist jeremiad nor a breathlessly
Panglossian ode to the digital self, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows
is a deeply thoughtful, surprising exploration of our “frenzied”
psyches in the age of the Internet. Whether you do it in pixels or
pages, read this book."
*Tom Vanderbilt, author, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and
What It Says About Us)*
"Nicholas Carr carefully examines the most important topic in
contemporary culture—the mental and social transformation created
by our new electronic environment. Without ever losing sight of the
larger questions at stake, he calmly demolishes the clichés that
have dominated discussions about the Internet. Witty, ambitious,
and immensely readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe
the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live."
*Dana Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for
the Arts*
"The core of education is this: developing the capacity to
concentrate. The fruits of this capacity we call civilization. But
all that is finished, perhaps. Welcome to the shallows, where the
un-educating of homo sapiens begins. Nicholas Carr does a wonderful
job synthesizing the recent cognitive research. In doing so, he
gently refutes the ideologists of progress, and shows what is
really at stake in the daily habits of our wired lives: the
re-constitution of our minds. What emerges for the reader,
inexorably, is the suspicion that we have well and truly screwed
ourselves."
*Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class As Soulcraft*
"Ultimately, The Shallows is a book about the preservation of the
human capacity for contemplation and wisdom, in an epoch where both
appear increasingly threatened. Nick Carr provides a
thought-provoking and intellectually courageous account of how the
medium of the Internet is changing the way we think now and how
future generations will or will not think. Few works could be more
important."
*Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and
Science of the Reading Brain*
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