Nicholas Carr has quite a reputation in IT circles. He’s the man who in 2004 wrote the book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage. The book had its origins in Carr’s infamous article published in the Harvard Business Review under the title of IT Doesn’t Matter.
The central premise of Carr’s argument was that the strategic importance of IT was declining. He suggested it was following a familiar pattern laid down by earlier technologies such as the railways and electric power, which had initially conferred competitive advantage on forward-looking com-panies but this had diminished as the systems became standardised and cheaper.
Carr drew strong protest from the panjandrums in HP, Microsoft and Intel, though I confess to hav-ing been one who found Carr’s argument worth considering. I once asked a Microsoft reseller how he could claim to offer company A competitive advantage through IT when he was selling more or less exactly the same solution based on essentially homogenous software and hardware to company B down the road.
I don’t think I ever got a satisfactory answer because it seemed to me it was only when you looked beyond IT that you could start to see real differentiation between the two companies, by which I mean the people, the culture and business practices – in other words, the elements that were already in place before any new fangled IT made its mark.
This may explain the current preoccupation with emphasising IT as part of the overall business plat-form and as an enabler, rather than the earlier claims that technology was a means of revolutionising the business and delivering competitive advantage.
Anyway, the controversial Carr is at it again. His latest argument, if I can put it very broadly, is that the Internet is re-programming our minds. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, he states: “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of par-ticles.”
He reports that a number of people have admitted finding it difficult to enjoy the ‘deep reading’ that is required to stay focused on reading longer pieces of writing, such as a book, because their attention wanders. It’s in the nature of the Internet for our minds to “operate as high-speed data-processing machines” because that’s part of its “reigning business model”, claims Carr.
Google and others want us to surf faster across the Web, click more links and view more pages in order to provide them with more information about us. “The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction,” Carr argues.
If deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking, then what are we doing to our minds? Carr quotes playwright Richard Foreman, who warns that we are at risk of turning into ‘pancake people’, spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button”.
The question is: why do we need so much distraction? If the Internet is reprogramming our minds, it’s doing so with our willing complicity – otherwise why would we be so willing to be distracted? Does any of this matter from an IT perspective? Only in so much as a failure to engage with any issue at a deeper level and to concentrate on something without distraction can hardly be conducive to delivering competitive advantage – or innovation, for that matter.
Ironically, you could argue that, even if Carr is right in suggesting IT no longer confers competitive advantage, he was wrong to claim IT “doesn’t matter”. What does he think is powering the Internet and turning us all into gadflies with very limited attention spans?
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