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Is it checkmate for IT?

I read too many books. Or it’s probably more accurate to say I get involved in too many books. For example, I am just finishing up “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology And the Law To Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity,” by Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. Which I interrupted to read a novel about professional chess players called “The Queen’s Gambit,” by an old writing school teacher of mine. At the same time I am about a third of the way through a book about the Afghanistan war—the first one, the one against the Russians—called “Charlie Wilson’s War.” And I just started reading “Does IT Matter?: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage,” by Nicholas Carr, the follow-up book to his controversial article, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” published almost exactly a year ago in the Harvard Business Review.

That’s a lot to juggle, mentally---at least it is for me. But it’s not unusual. I’ve always had a big dose of attention-deficit disorder when it comes to reading—and watching television and surfing the Web, too, for that matter. And it tends to jumble things up a bit in my mind. I might find myself wondering about the intellectual-property implications of the SA-7 surface-to-air missile. Or how the Mujahideen might have used the Sicilian Defense against the Russians. Or how IT really provides no competitive advantage in the fight against terrorists.

I don’t mean to give short shrift to Carr’s book. I fully intend to finish it and write a proper review. It’s just that I have already stumbled over sentences like this—and it’s only the preface: “Simply put, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to draw any broad conclusions about IT’s effect on the competitiveness and profitability of individual businesses.” Somehow I think Carr is being a bit disingenuous—something tells me he fully intends to draw broad conclusions about IT’s effect on competitiveness and profitability (see title of book). But what does that have to do with copyright law? And is he going to tell me how to get around the Ruy Lopez?

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