Author Nicholas Carr to give 2020 Sutherland Lecture via Zoom

Saint Michael’s College Dean of Faculty Tara Natarajan announced this week that author, journalist and scholar Nicholas Carr, whose work focuses on the intersection of technology, economics and culture, will deliver this year’s annual Sutherland Lecture virtually by Zoom on October 22 at 4:30 p.m.

Nick Carr

The title of Carr’s talk is “Virtually Living: How Digital Media Shapes our Thoughts and Perceptions.” Carr is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Shallows and was formerly the executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.

A journalist by trade, Carr is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller, and The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014), which examines the personal, social, and business consequences of our ever-growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps. His most recent book, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations (2016), uses a collection of his 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 advisers, 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 was a principal at a management consulting company. Carr holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard University.