Nicholas Carr

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Nicholas Carr (2008)

Nicholas Carr (also: Nicholas G. Carr and: Nick Carr , * 1959 ) is an American author and business journalist who deals in particular with the development of the Internet and the social effects of the digital revolution .

Life

Nicholas Carr studied English and American literature and language at Dartmouth College and Harvard . He was initially an editor, later (alongside Sarah Cliffe) between 2000 and 2003 editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review .

From 2008 until recently, Carr was a member of the Encyclopædia Britannica's Editorial Board of Advisors .

Carr is a board member of the World Economic Forum's cloud computing project .

He publishes in the British Guardian and the Times as well as in the American newspapers and magazines The Atlantic , The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , Wired , The New Republic , in the Financial Times and in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit . Carr also appears at conventions and lectures.

Positions

Nicholas Carr predominantly represents critical and pessimistic theses regarding the effects of digitization on society.

He is a publicist first emerged with his article "IT does not matter" (in German mutatis mutandis as: "the IT it does not matter"), which in May 2003 - so soon after the burst of the so-called dot-com bubble - in the Harvard Business Review was published and which was published shortly afterwards in an expanded form as a book. Carr is of the opinion that the use of information technology promises less and less a strategic competitive advantage for companies over time, because with falling costs and ever better availability, IT is also used by competitors. As a result of the advancing standardization, the production methods and the processes of the competitors became more similar. The biggest mistake that can be made when using information technology is to spend too much on the company's own IT infrastructure. In terms of the result, it is not worthwhile to always use the latest (and thus: the most expensive) technology. Carr sees potential savings primarily in avoiding unnecessary software updates and in using open source software. Anyone who wants to get an impression of how high the savings potential in this regard could be should consider the profit margin of a company like Microsoft. Admittedly, these theses caused an extensive controversy, some of which is still having an impact today.

In his essay “The amorality of Web 2.0”, Carr opposes the transfiguration of the Internet and Web 2.0 . In the emergence of free content in blogs and wikis , he recognizes a cultural decline: Wikipedia is only "a pale reflection of Britannica ", and the blogosphere is "superficial" because opinions are more important to bloggers than continuous reporting. That is why he turns against the "amateur cult", which he contrasts with the skills of professional journalists and lexicon authors, whose activities are endangered by the free of charge Web 2.0 formats and the newspaper crisis .

Subsequently, Carr dealt with the emergence of cloud computing . The Internet, which was originally just a distribution network, will become “not only a universal computer [...] but also a universal medium” through the establishment of the “cloud”. The computerization have increased productivity, so many jobs have been lost. This process will be further exacerbated by the transition to cloud computing. On the one hand, amateurs could now take on complicated work in cultural production on their own computers, such as mixing the sound for sound recordings or editing photos; on the other hand, it has become questionable whether the still expensive cultural goods such as journalism will continue to be affordable. "It might turn out that the culture of diversity that the internet has created is really just a culture of mediocrity."

In the German-speaking world, Nicholas Carr is best known for his pessimistic assessments of the connection between Internet use and the resulting change in thinking. In the essay, which was published in 2008 in the magazine The Atlantic under the title: “Is Google making us stupid?” (In German, for example: “Macht (us) Google stupid?"), Later in an expanded version in the book " The Shallows "(German title:" Who am I when I'm online ... and what is my brain doing for so long? How the Internet changes our thinking "), he states that, about ten years after he started, read online, no longer as was previously able to record longer texts. On the one hand, the amount of text that we now have to process thanks to digital media is much higher than in the 1970s and 1980s, when television was still the leading medium . But reading has also changed, it has become more volatile , and brain research shows that reading habits have an effect on the shape of the brain and that it changes with its use by adapting itself. Longer, contemplative and analytical trains of thought and texts would become more and more difficult or even impossible. There is also a commercial interest behind this, because the more pages a user clicks on, the more data a company like Google can collect about them in order to use them when placing advertisements. It also increases the productivity of “knowledge work”. Carr takes on a pessimistic tone. Ultimately, however, it must remain open whether this development is to be assessed as disadvantageous, because there were also critical voices with the invention of the printing press, who believed that the cheaper availability of books was associated with disadvantages that far outweigh the advantages.

reception

Nicholas Carr's theses were mainly noticed by critics of the digital media and received a large number of them. Frank Schirrmacher, for example, referred to Carr in his book “Payback” in 2009. In August 2008, Der Spiegel took up the title of the Atlantic and asked for its part: “Does the Internet make stupid?” Manfred Spitzer's theses on “digital dementia” are similar to Carr's book “Who am I when I'm online ... and what does my brain do for so long ? ”Has been linked. Mercedes Bunz found in 2012 that the “concerned” question of whether the use of Google made “stupid” after an attempt to discuss it seriously - first in magazines and in the daily press, later also at the table - “ultimately to them Round tables adjourned ”. She puts Carr in a row with other, very different, at least pessimistic critics of digitization and counters them that it was not the devices or the Web 2.0 platforms that changed our thinking, but the way we deal with them.

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • Digital enterprise. How to Reshape Your Business for a Connected World . Boston. Harvard Business School Press. 2001. ISBN 1-57851-558-0
  • Does IT matter? . Boston. Harvard Business School Press. 2004. ISBN 1-59139-444-9
  • The big switch: The networking of the world from Edison to Google. The big change . Translation from the American by Reinhard Engel. Heidelberg. mitp publishing house. 2009. ISBN 978-3-8266-5508-1
  • Who am I when I'm online ... and what is my brain doing while I am online? How the Internet is changing our thinking ( The Shallows: Mind, Memory and Media in the Age of Instant Information ). From the American English by Henning Dedekind. Munich. Blessing Publishing House. 2010. ISBN 978-3-89667-428-9  - New edition under the title: Surfen im Seichten. What the internet does to our brains . Munich. Pantheon Publishing House. 2013. ISBN 978-3-570-55205-6
  • Suspended. Where are people when computers decide? From the American by Karin Miedler and Sigrid Schmid. Hanser publishing house. Munich. 2014. ISBN 978-3-446-44032-6
  • Utopia is creepy and other provocations . WW Norton & Company. New York. 2016. ISBN 978-0-393-25454-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For example, The Guardian : Nick Carr . Profile. Without a date. Retrieved January 7, 2013.
  2. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, the description of the résumé is based on the self-portrayal on Nicholas Carr's private website: Biography ( Memento of November 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) . In: nicholasgcarr.com. 2004-2008. Retrieved January 5, 2013.
  3. ↑ No direct information could be found on the exact duration of the activity as editor-in-chief of the magazine. The oldest document that can be found that identifies him as such is from 2000, the most recent from 2003: First mover disadvantage . In: Growth Strategies. FutureScan. August 14, 2000. - How to build motivation in today's workplace . In: The Christian Science Monitor. March 17, 2003 - Retrieved January 5, 2013 from HighBeam Research.
  4. ^ Recent members: Nicholas Carr. Author, editor and blogger . In: britannica.com. Without a date. Retrieved January 5, 2013.
  5. ↑ Speaking. In: Nicholas Carr. Retrieved May 9, 2014, June 4, 2016 (American English).
  6. ^ A b Nicholas Carr: IT Doesn't Matter . In: Harvard Business Review. May 2003. pp. 5-12. - A free online version is available in eight parts on Carr's blog: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] (online January 6, 2013).
  7. ↑ Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage . Boston. Harvard Business School Press. 2004. ISBN 1-59139-444-9
  8. ↑ See the discussion documentation on: IT Doesn't Matter ( Memento from October 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) . In: nicholasgcarr.com. 2004. Retrieved January 6, 2013.
  9. ↑ Letters to the Editor: Does IT matter? To HBR Debate ( Memento of May 14, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 503 kB) . Compilation of letters to the editor to discuss Carr's essay in the Harvard Business Review. June 2003.
  10. ^ A b Nicholas Carr: The amorality of Web 2.0 . In: Rough Type. October 3, 2005. Retrieved January 6, 2013.
  11. ↑ Nicholas Carr: The big switch: The networking of the world from Edison to Google. The big change . Translation from the American by Reinhard Engel. Heidelberg. mitp publishing house. 2009. ISBN 978-3-8266-5508-1
  12. ^ A b Nicholas Carr: Our Future in the Matrix . In: The time. November 8, 2009. Retrieved January 6, 2013.
  13. ^ A b Nicholas Carr: Is Google making us stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains . In: The Atlantic. July / August 2008.
  14. ↑ Who am I when I am online ... and what is my brain doing while I am online? How the Internet is changing our thinking ( The Shallows: Mind, Memory and Media in the Age of Instant Information ). From the American English by Henning Dedekind. Munich. Blessing Publishing House. 2010. ISBN 978-3-89667-428-9  - New edition under the title: Surfen im Seichten. What the internet does to our brains . Munich. Pantheon Publishing House. 2013. ISBN 978-3-570-55205-6
  15. ^ Nicholas Carr: Does the Internet Make You Dumber? . In: The Wall Street Journal. June 5, 2010. Retrieved January 6, 2013.
  16. ↑ Frank Schirrmacher: Payback. Why we are forced to do what we don't want to do in the information age and how we regain control of our thinking. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-89667-336-7 (pages 58-62; passim).
  17. ↑ The mirror . 33/2008. August 11, 2008. With the cover stories: Frank Hornig, Martin U. Müller, Susanne Weingarten: Die Daten-Sucht (p. 80) and: Julia Bronstein: Write-off 2.0 (p. 86). Retrieved January 14, 2013.
  18. ↑ Werner Bartens: Bestseller "Digital Dementia" by Manfred Spitzer. Crude theories, assembled in a populist way . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. September 9, 2012. Retrieved February 13, 2013.
  19. ↑ Mercedes Bunz: The silent revolution - How algorithms change knowledge, work, the public and politics without making a lot of noise . Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3518260432 (edition unseld 43, page 25f .; 51f.).
  20. ↑ 2011 finalists . In: pulitzer.org. Without a date. Retrieved January 6, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Carr, Nicholas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Carr, Nicholas G .; Carr, Nick
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author and business journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1959