Nicholas Carr is excellent at being reductive -- that is, intentionally leaving out important facts in order to make a successful argument. He's pretty good at

Nicholas Carr is excellent at being reductive -- that is, intentionally leaving out important facts in order to make a successful argument. He's pretty good at red herrings, too. For instance: he wrote a whole book about why the day when you get an automatic advantage against your competitors because you're using technology is over. (And that, he strongly implies, is the whole point of technology: to get an advantage over competitors.) Red herring. That's not why businesses use technology; they use it so that they can do stuff they could never do before. No one orders MS Office because they think they're doing something their every competitor hasn't done. He was being reductive when he wrote a book about why IT services will quickly become a commodity the way electrical service did. (The analogy does not fit; few people need "custom" electricity, but most business have special needs and will need something beyond standard installs of software.) I'm willing to bet that he's using one or both of these tactics here, in order to get hackles up and sell books. I find it hard to take him seriously. It turned out that a whole lot of people were just then realizing that, like Carr, they had lost their ability to fully concentrate on long, thoughtful written works. "I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do," Carr wrote. Really? I'm probably better at reading long-form prose now than I've ever been. It's like saying if you spend some time as a sprinter that you will completely lose the ability to run long distances.