Ryn Shane-Armstrong's List: Tech Thinkers / Writers

• Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture.
• His 2004  book Does IT Matter?, published by Harvard Business School Press, set  off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. His  widely acclaimed new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, examines the rise  of "cloud computing" and its implications for business, media and society.
• In 2005, Optimize magazine named Carr one of the leading thinkers on information technology, and  in 2007 eWeek named him one of the 100 most influential people  in IT.

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• Orlowski became a columnist based in San Francisco, U.S. for The Register in 2000.

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  In December 2004, he was invited to assemble a panel on techno-utopianism at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.^[5] Orlowski argues that this form of utopianism distracts attention and diverts capital away from solving real infrastructure problems.^[6] "Technology can help us," he writes on his FAQ page.^[4] "But we venerate the machines we have, which aren't very good, and worse, limit ourselves to seeing the world through this machine metaphor. Technology is useful when it makes something we already like to do easier. Technology can't tell us something we don't know. Technology cannot solve problems that don't exist."

• The information passes too quickly from the screen to the homework papers and isn’t processed through the mind. The speed and ease of the digital resources actually conspires against producing long-term understanding.
• Kids have access to more information than before but they aren’t on educational Web sites, they are on MySpace.com or espn.com. They go to social networking sites, which causes them to indulge where they are—adolescence—and not move forward.
• You improve your writing when you are pulled upward and challenged. The blogs keep them networking only with their peers and that holds them at the same level.
• The Internet allows people to create their own little universe. They only make contact with things that interest them. They enclose themselves in the music they like, the politics they like—and what we see is an isolation of young people who really get into this world. This is spiritually withering.

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• Mark Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988. He has taught at Emory since 1989, with a two-and-a-half year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director, Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts. Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education.
• • Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (Encounter Books, 2001)
     
   
  • Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)
     
   
  • The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief (Duke University Press, 1997)
     
   
  • Whitman and the American Idiom (Louisiana State University Press, 1991)
     
   
  • Civil Rights Chronicle: The African American Struggle for Freedom, with Clayborne Carson, Myrtle Evers-Williams, Todd Steven Burroughs, Ella Forbes, and Jim Haskins (Publications International, Ltd., 2003)
     
   
  • A Handbook of Literary Terms, with Dana Gioia and X. J. Kennedy (Longman, 2004)