Nicholas G. Carr quotes

Nicholas G. Carr is an American writer and business thinker, recognized for his influential work on technology and culture. His book "Does IT Matter?" sparked widespread debate about the strategic importance of information technology. He is also known for his critique of the internet's impact on cognition, notably in "The Shallows." Here are 28 of his quotes:

What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.

Nicholas G. Carr

In the long run, though, the greatest IT risk facing most companies is more prosaic than a catastrophe. It is, simply, overspending. IT may be a commodity, and its costs may fall rapidly enough to ensure that any new capabilities are quickly shared, but the very fact that it is entwined with so many business functions means that it will continue to consume a large portion of corporate spending.

Nicholas G. Carr

By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few.

Nicholas G. Carr

The Net's interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

Nicholas G. Carr

In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

Nicholas G. Carr

Worrying about what might go wrong may not be as glamorous a job as speculating about the future, but it is a more essential job right now.

Nicholas G. Carr

Today, no one would dispute that information technology has become the backbone of commerce. It underpins the operations of individual companies, ties together far-flung supply chains, and, increasingly, links businesses to the customers they serve. Hardly a dollar or a euro changes hands anymore without the aid of computer systems.

Nicholas G. Carr

...media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Nicholas G. Carr

I think what the book did in addition to its practical uses, is it gave us a more attentive way of thinking.

Nicholas G. Carr

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with 'content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

Nicholas G. Carr

You can take a book to the beach without worrying about sand getting in its works. You can take it to bed without being nervous about it falling to the floor should you nod off. You can spill coffee on it. You can sit on it. You can put it down on a table, open to the page you're reading, and when you pick it up a few days later it will still be exactly as you left it. You never have to be concerned about plugging a book into an outlet or having its battery die.

Nicholas G. Carr

What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction.

Nicholas G. Carr

The Internet, like all intellectual technologies has a trade off. As we train our brains to use it, as we adapt to the environment of the internet, which is an environment of kind of constant immersion and information and constant distractions, interruptions, juggling lots of messages, lots of bits of information.

Nicholas G. Carr

I think if you look back through the intellectual history of human beings you can trace the way that intellectual technologies influence the way we think.

Nicholas G. Carr

We don't constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory - but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, by bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.

Nicholas G. Carr

The only thing going on is the progression of words and sentences across page after page and so suddenly we see this immersive kind of very attentive thinking, whether you are paying attention to a story or to an argument, or whatever. And what we know about the brain is the brain adapts to these types of tools.

Nicholas G. Carr

There are a whole lot of reasons to be very happy that our brains are able to adapt and adapt so readily because we do strengthen and become more efficient at things we do a lot of in changed ways of thinking that we might need.

Nicholas G. Carr

A lot of your mental energy goes to figuring out where does one word end and the next begin.

Nicholas G. Carr

We become, after the arrival of the printing press in general, more attentive more attuned to contemplative ways of thinking.

Nicholas G. Carr

One of the fascinating things about early writing on slates, on papyrus, even on early handwritten books, is for instance, there were no space between the words. People just wrote in continuous script.

Nicholas G. Carr

Culture is sustained in our synapses...It's more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

Nicholas G. Carr

I think that the book in some ways is the most interesting from our own present standpoint, particularly when we want to think about the way the internet is changing us.

Nicholas G. Carr