Carr is an American writer, editor, and professor whose work focuses on Internet technologies and their effects on society and individual psychology. Carr is a graduate of Harvard and Dartmouth, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a winner of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, a visiting professor of sociology at Williams College, a member of Encyclopaedia Britannica's editorial board, and a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. 

In addition to The Shallows, Carr has also written books on technology and business strategy (Does IT Matter?), cloud computing (The Big Switch), and artificial intelligence (The Glass Cage: Automation and Us). In 2016, Carr published a collection of his essays, articles, and blog posts from across his career titled Utopia Is Creepy. Carr critiques contemporary developments in Internet discourse on his blog, Rough Type.

McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian media theorist who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in his seminal work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term “global village” in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. McLuhan’s critiques of electronic media focused on radio and television; however, he theorized about a future evolution of electronic media that would be an extension of consciousness, subsuming all other technologies—a description eerily similar to the Internet.