Nicholas Carr
Authors & Journalists · The Shallows (book)
Author of The Shallows, part of the wider tech-criticism reading list behind this library's case against unchecked platform design.
Nicholas Carr is part of the secondary tier of technology critics the Evidence Library draws on for wider context. His book, The Shallows, is grouped among a broader body of critical writing on how the internet's design affects reading, focus, and thought. Alongside Jaron Lanier, Roger McNamee, Max Fisher, Adam Alter, Cal Newport, and Sherry Turkle, his work rounds out the case this library makes for rethinking how platforms are designed and who they affect.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (10)
BOOKS
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
The Shallows is Nicholas Carr's 2010 book, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, arguing that habitual internet use is associated with a shift away from sustained, linear reading toward skimming and rapid task-switching. Drawing on neuroplasticity research and his own experience, Carr describes losing patience for long-form reading after years of heavy online use, and links frequent hyperlinking, notifications, and multitasking to reduced attention span and shallower processing of information, in contrast with the deep-reading habits he associates with books. He frames the internet not as inherently harmful but as a medium whose design rewards distraction over depth. TechKids Foundation includes The Shallows as an early, widely cited articulation of concerns about attention and screen-mediated reading that later research on children's device use would build on.
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
The Glass Cage, published in 2014 (later reissued in paperback under the subtitle 'How Our Computers Are Changing Us'), extends the argument of Carr's essay 'The Great Forgetting' into a full book. He surveys automated systems in aviation, medicine, law, and architecture, describing a recurring pattern he calls a 'de-skilling' or 'generation' effect: professionals who rely on software to perform a task are, over time, associated with a weaker grasp of that task's underlying judgment than those who learned it manually. Carr is not opposed to automation itself; the book frames itself as balancing an appreciation of technology's benefits with a warning about uncritical reliance on it. Reviewed by the New York Times among other outlets, the book widens Carr's attention-and-cognition argument from reading and internet use specifically to software-mediated work generally. TechKids Foundation includes it as a documented extension of the attention-and-skill-erosion concern to automation broadly.
Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
Utopia Is Creepy, published in 2016, collects two decades of Carr's essays and blog posts, largely drawn from his Rough Type blog, critiquing what he characterizes as the technology industry's techno-utopian rhetoric. The pieces question claims that social media, constant connectivity, and algorithmic personalization are unambiguously improving how people relate to one another and to information, arguing instead that these systems are associated with narrower, more commercially shaped views of the world, reduced privacy, and diminished independent thought. The book is a collection of previously published shorter pieces rather than a single sustained argument, and it does not present original data. TechKids Foundation includes it as a representative sample of the broader body of tech-culture criticism this library draws on for context, distinct from Carr's book-length arguments about reading and automation specifically.
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
Superbloom, Carr's 2025 book, argues that social media and constant connectivity have coincided with a fraying of shared understanding rather than the closer community that early internet boosters promised. Named a Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 in technology, it traces communication technologies from the telegraph through today's platforms, arguing each leap in ease of connection has been associated with new frictions, including outrage, polarization, and a diminished sense of shared public reality, rather than resolving earlier ones. Carr frames heavy platform use as reshaping users' sense of self and their relationships with others, without attributing this to any single design choice or company. TechKids Foundation includes it as Carr's most recent and most directly social-media-focused book, extending his decades-long argument about technology's effect on attention and thought to platforms' effect on collective life.
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
The Big Switch, published in January 2008, is Carr's earliest book-length argument about the internet's societal effects, preceding The Shallows. Its central comparison, reflected in the subtitle 'Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,' likens the rise of centralized, utility-style computing to the historical shift from private electric generators to a shared power grid a century earlier, arguing that concentrating computing power and information flow in a small number of large platforms carries tradeoffs between convenience and dependence. The book also considers how an advertising-driven web economy shapes what content is produced and who profits from it, themes Carr would return to in his later, more attention-focused work. It presents historical argument and analysis rather than new empirical data. TechKids Foundation includes it as the foundational text connecting the internet's business model and structure to the cultural and attentional concerns explored in Carr's later books.
VIDEOS
'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online (NPR interview)
In this June 2010 All Things Considered segment, NPR interviews Nicholas Carr about The Shallows shortly after its release. Carr describes the internet as returning people to what he calls a "natural state of distractedness," arguing that constant novelty and interruption online are associated with weaker sustained attention compared with the more linear, single-focus engagement that books and print reading require. The segment translates the book's argument for a general public-radio audience rather than presenting new data, and situates Carr's claims within the wider public debate at the time over whether the internet was fundamentally changing how people think. TechKids Foundation includes this interview as a documented example of Carr's argument reaching a mainstream audience, distinct from the book itself and his print essays.
Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains' (PBS NewsHour)
This short PBS NewsHour segment, first broadcast around August 2010 and later posted to the program's YouTube channel, profiles Carr's book The Shallows through what the segment itself describes as a neuroscience lens. It presents Carr's central claim, that habitual internet use is associated with changes in how the brain processes information and favors rapid scanning over sustained focus, in an accessible broadcast format aimed at a general news audience rather than a specialist one. The segment does not conduct its own research; it summarizes the book's argument and situates it within the wider public conversation about digital technology and cognition circulating at the time. TechKids Foundation includes this video as a mainstream broadcast-news treatment of Carr's core argument, distributed by a major public-media outlet.
Utopia Is Creepy — Book Talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival
In this October 2016 Book TV recording, Nicholas Carr discusses Utopia Is Creepy at the Wisconsin Book Festival, held at the Central Branch of the Madison Public Library. Speaking to a general public audience, he walks through the book's central argument that the technology industry's rhetoric of connection, openness, and empowerment is associated with outcomes, including reduced privacy, concentrated commercial power, and narrower attention, that often run counter to that framing, drawing on essays collected in the book. As a recorded public talk rather than a research presentation, it does not introduce new data beyond what appears in the book itself. TechKids Foundation includes this C-SPAN recording as a documented, on-record public appearance in which Carr explains his critique of tech-industry optimism directly, in his own words, to a live audience.
STUDIES
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
In this July/August 2008 Atlantic cover essay, Nicholas Carr describes a personal and professional sense that heavy internet use, especially search engines, was changing how he read and thought, making sustained concentration on long texts harder even as information-gathering became easier. He cites early commentary from other writers and researchers noticing a similar shift toward skimming rather than deep reading, and situates the internet within a history of technologies, such as the clock and the printing press, that reshaped human thought in ways society recognized only gradually. The essay is explicitly personal and speculative rather than a research report, and it became the seed for Carr's later book The Shallows. TechKids Foundation includes it as the original, influential public statement of the attention-and-reading concern this library's evidence base returns to.
All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines
Also known by its original print title 'The Great Forgetting,' this November 2013 Atlantic essay extends Carr's attention-focused argument to automation more broadly. He describes cases, chiefly in aviation, where pilots increasingly monitor autopilot systems rather than fly manually, and where heavy reliance on automated systems is associated with atrophy of the underlying human skill, so that when the automation fails, the operator may be less prepared to intervene than before the technology existed. Carr extends the concern to everyday computing, arguing that offloading memory, navigation, and problem-solving to devices carries a similar tradeoff between convenience and skill retention. The essay synthesizes existing research and case reports rather than presenting new data of its own. TechKids Foundation includes it as the direct precursor to Carr's book The Glass Cage and a widely read statement of the automation-and-skill-erosion concern.