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NICHOLAS CARR

A compelling writer and speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and culture, author of “The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us”

Nick Carr is a compelling writer and speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and culture. A journalist by trade, he is the author of the acclaimed book The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (2014), which examines the personal and social consequences of our ever-growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps. His previous work, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016) uses a collection of Carr’s seminal essays to further explore the Internet’s impact on society.

Carr is also the author of two other influential books, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008), which the Financial Times calls “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing,” and Does IT Matter?: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (2004). His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Carr has written for The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wired, Nature, and MIT Technology Review, among others. His essays, including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “The Great Forgetting,” have been featured in several anthologies, including The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best Technology Writing. In 2015, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association.

Carr is a former member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors, was on the steering board of the World Economic Forum’s cloud computing project, and was a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school. He also maintains the popular blog Rough Type.

Earlier in his career, he served as executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.

Carr holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard University.

Analytics
Big Data
Cloud Computing.
Enterprise 2.0.
Information & eBusiness Management
Information Technology
Innovation, Integration & Creativity
Loyalty & Customer Relationship Management
Managing Change
Organizational Behavior
Social Capital, Trust & Culture
Social Networking
Web 2.0

Nicholas Carr is a stimulating and thought-provoking speaker on issues related to technology, culture, and business. He has spoken to professional and academic audiences around the world. He was a keynote speaker at Google’s first Atmosphere conference in London, at the Seoul Digital Forum, at Futurecom in Rio de Janiero, at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, and at many other events, and he has lectured at MIT, Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Notre Dame, Williams College, TCU, NASA, and the Newberry Library, among other schools and institutions.

Computers, Automation and the Human Future

Nicholas Carr, author of such celebrated books as The Shallows and The Glass Cage, will offer a lively and provocative examination of how digital technologies are shaping our jobs, lives and society. Drawing on examples ranging from doctors’ offices to airplane cockpits to the recent presidential campaign, Carr will argue that prevailing software and systems design philosophies end up eroding skills, diminishing contextual and critical thinking, and creating a culture of distraction and dependency. He will make the case that only by shifting our assumptions about technology and its personal and social consequences will we be able to forge a future fit for human beings rather than robots.

The Glass Cage

Digging behind the headlines about artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, digitized medicine and workplace robots, Nicholas Carr explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. In this presentation, based upon the themes in his latest book, The Glass Cage, Carr explores the impact of automation from a deeply human perspective. Mixing history and philosophy, poetry and science, the book culminates in a moving meditation on how we can use technology to expand the human experience rather than narrow it.

The Shallows

Drawing on the themes in his Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling book, Nick Carr lucidly examines the most important topic in contemporary culture – the mental and social transformation created by our electronic environment. In this presentation, Carr provides a deep, enlightening examination of how the Internet influences the brain and its neutral pathways and concludes with a very humanistic petition for balancing our human and computer interactions.

Building A Bridge to the Cloud

Over the past few years, much of the excitement – and challenge – of cloud computing has focused on building the infrastructure. But as we saw a hundred years ago with the electric grid, the biggest wave of innovation begins only after the infrastructure is stable. In this talk, Nick looks ahead to the next stage of cloud disruption, and provides practical ad-vice on how companies can “build bridges to the cloud” for their customers.

The Big Switch

Drawing on the themes in his bestselling books, Nick describes how the World Wide Web is turning into the World Wide Computer as data and software move into the internet “cloud.” Exploding the narrow definition of “Web 2.0,” Carr puts the shift into a broad technological, economic, and historical context, laying out the challenges and opportunities that businesses will face as they confront computing’s new age.

The Prudent Innovator

Noting that innovation isn’t free, Nick argues that organizations should focus their creativity on a few critical areas – the ones capable of producing a competitive edge – and be ruth-less imitators elsewhere. He offers a series of pragmatic and often surprising strategies that will increase the odds that innovation initiatives and investments really pay off, illustrating them with compelling examples.

Does IT Matter?

Nick draws on his celebrated book, Does IT Matter? to examine the strategic role of IT. Can IT innovation still provide strong competitive advantage, or has it become a cost of doing business, essential but strategically inert? This presentation will challenge the assumptions and stir the thinking of technologists and business managers alike.