Matthew B. Crawford

A follow-up to the best-selling Shop Class as Soulcraft investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind, citing examples from professional sports and the working world to illuminate the role of negative cultural assumptions on today's attention-related crises.

On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

The World Beyond Your Head

Marielle de Geest

Starts off kind of promising and then devolves into a pile of self referential garbage. Couldn't wait for it to be over.

I struggle to find an appropriate rating for this book- three stars understates its usefulness and four stars gives too much credit. 

It's a rewarding, almost necessary read. Calling for an "attentional commons," Crawford is particularly concerned about the invasion of corporate entities and advertisers into spaces normally carved out for reflection: airports, the back seat of a taxi, the space above a urinal. Used to be we directed our own attention in these settings, but now our attention is directed for us, and Crawford sees that as a call to arms.

To regain a bit of autonomy over our the object of our attention, Crawford argues that we have to interact with the physical world in order to "situate" ourselves in it. A mechanic accomplishes that task by using physical tools and getting dirty and interpreting the "real" signals that a faulty alternator sends out. Living in our heads (deliberate thinking, in other words, or writing a book, daydreaming, or composing a symphony) requires no physical interaction with the "real" world. By not anchoring ourselves to that physical world, we float away from it, ghost-like. In the space left between us and the physical world, corporate entities wedge their corporate agendas. And because we're no longer attached to the physical world, we're left to interpret that world through the layer of those corporate agendas, through representations of reality instead of reality itself. 

Electronic interfaces compound the problem by presenting representations of reality and trying to pass them off as reality itself. Gambling machines, touchscreens, electronically assisted braking systems: all of this starts to take on as semblance of reality, and by now we're too unfamiliar with reality to recognize the difference.

Crawford sees all this happening because of a fundamental flaw in Enlightenment thinking, the separation of the self from reality championed by Kant and Descartes. It's a dramatic oversimplification of Enlightenment thinking (as many reviewers have pointed out). 

If you can get past that reductionist thinking, and the significant leaps of logic, the book is tremendously useful as a framework for thinking about the Information Age. Crawford does hit gold on a fundamental truth here. As long as you remember that it's just one among an infinite number of truths, this will be a satisfying read.

Luke Stamps

A groundbreaking new book from the bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind. We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self. Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature. The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.

The World Beyond Your Head On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

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