...Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain…I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy…Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle....

American journalist and author. Carr received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A. in English from Harvard University, where he was executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. After nearly two decades as a management consultant, Carr published his first book, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (2004), earning him a reputation as a contrarian in an age of great excitement about technological change. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008) and his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), both argue that the explosion of innovation in information technology is already having widespread and unforeseen effects-not necessarily for the better-on commerce, culture, and human intelligence. Carr's detailed analysis of Wikipedia, declaring innumerable entries to be inaccurate and questioning the very idea of wiki or crowdsourced production, has won him a seat on the Encyclopedia Britannica's editorial board of advisors. See also nicholasgcarr.com.