September 2010: Rough Type

Nicholas Carr is one of the most eloquent, intelligent and engaging of writers on digital culture, whose 2008 essay for the Atlantic magazine, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, acted as a necessary corrective to the wild fantasies of evangelists for the utopian possibilities of the internet and began a debate about the nature of contemplative reading in the age of skimming across hyperlinks. Carr has recently expanded that essay into a book, The Shallows, which builds on two previous works, Does IT matter? and The Big Switch, which examined the growth of Cloud (or internet-based) computing.



Rough Type is Carr's blog on technology, focusing on the social and cultural consequences of the extraordinary change we are living through. Carr has an elegant, persuasive prose style and uses it to attemp to chart a course between the idealists and the luddites, pointing out that not everything that is overturned by revolution is happily lost.