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

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374535919
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	371,060
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Matthew B. Crawford is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a fabricator of components for custom motorcycles. His bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which has been translated into nine languages, has prompted a wide rethinking of education and labor policies in the United States and Europe, leading The Sunday Times to call him "one of the most influential thinkers of our time."

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Attention as a Cultural Problem 3

Part I Encountering Things

1 The Jig, the Nudge, and Local Ecology 31

2 Embodied Perception 45

3 Virtual Reality as Moral Ideal 69

4 Attention and Design 79

5 Autism as a Design Principle: Gambling 89

Interlude: A Brief History of Freedom 113

Part II Other People

6 On Being Led Out 127

7 Encountering Things with Other People 141

8 Achieving Individuality 151

9 The Culture of Performance 161

10 The Erotics of Attention 169

11 The Flattening 181

12 The Statistical Self 195

Part III Inheritance

13 The Organ Makers' Shop 209

Epilogue: Reclaiming the Real 247

Notes 259

Acknowledgments 285

Index 289

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/15/2014
Crawford (Shop Class as Soulcraft) is deeply interested in how one masters one’s own mind, especially in a time of information overload and constant distraction provided by technology. In a manner similar to Malcolm Gladwell, this brilliant work looks at individuals from varied walks of life, including hockey players and short-order cooks, to focus on the theme of how important (and difficult) it is to truly pay attention in our noisy, busy world. Crawford’s sources, ranging from the philosophy of Kant to testimony from gambling addicts, might seem too disparate to ever cohere, yet he synthesizes them with skill. The result will force readers to dig deeply into their own “metacognition” (thinking about thinking). Beyond individual experiences, the book traces Western thought from the Enlightenment to contemporary times, persuasively arguing that much of our thinking about individuality and cognition is, simply put, wrong. Crawford’s arguments can be dense at times, but they are not meant to be digested in pull quotes. Readers will feel rewarded for spending the time with a text this rich in excellent research, argument, and prose. Agent: Tina Bennett, WME. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Both impassioned and profound.” —Christopher Shea, The Washington Post on Shop Class as Soulcraft

“Recent press coverage has sent word-of-mouth buzz on Shop Class through the roof, but it really is a book whose time, in our culture, has come.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times on Shop Class as Soulcraft

From the Publisher

★ 02/15/2015
Crawford (senior fellow, Univ. of Virginia's Inst. for Advanced Studies in Culture; Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work) here takes a unique look at attention, positing that it is a commodity. He sets out to establish that in a world of increasingly pervasive distractions, individualism can only be attained through focus. Crawford uses examples of skilled labor and craftsmanship to explain how people can gain back some of their lost autonomy (a word he works over quite thoroughly) through concentration. He explains his theories well, with strong writing and citations, and the resulting argument is fresh and extremely enlightening. What is most satisfying is that technology is not blamed for the modern deluge of distractions—it is discussed as the cumulative effect of a number of influences found within Western culture. VERDICT This illuminating work will appeal to students of philosophy and sociology, as well as fans of good cultural analysis. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/14.]—Matthew Gallagher, Victoria, BC

Library Journal

Robert Fass provides an intelligent and considered reading of this complex exploration of attention and focus in contemporary life. However, despite his skill, the work is ultimately so dense and explores so many ideas that the listener may have a difficult time following the main thread. Overall, this book sometimes sounds like a philosophical treatise. Fass's voice is easy to listen to, but keeping up with Crawford's writing style in the audio format, ironically, may drive the listener to distraction—or at least to replay sections in order to better absorb the material. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2015 - AudioFile

2014-12-06
A philosopher mounts a polemic against self-absorption, subjectivism and conformity. In this astute, acerbic cultural critique, political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Crawford, senior fellow at the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, focuses on what he sees as a philosophical, social and psychological crisis: individuals' assiduous distraction from engagement in "the shared world." Drawing on a wide range of thinkers, including Descartes, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kant, Alfred Kinsey and Sherry Turkle, Crawford argues that contemporary culture has been undermined by an Enlightenment notion of autonomy, which takes "an intransigent stance against the authority of other people," even other people's notions of reality. This view, however, is complicated by many individuals' desire to see themselves as representative and conform to "the wisdom of the crowd." The author excoriates commercialism, and he maintains that choice is not synonymous with freedom. Individuals, after all, choose only among offerings of manipulative corporations, acting out of greed in a so-called free market. "We take the ‘preferences' of the individual to be sacred, the mysterious welling up of his authentic self," writes the author, "and therefore unavailable for rational scrutiny." True freedom requires that "the actor is in touch with the world and other people, in comparison to which the autistic pseudo-autonomy of manufactured experiences is revealed as a pale substitute." As in his earlier book, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), Crawford celebrates productive work and craftsmanship by carpenters, mechanics, plumbers and organ makers: Learning a skill and honing a craft, he believes, affords individuals a chance to connect knowledge to "the pragmatic setting in which its value becomes apparent" and to contribute to a shared reality. Occasionally ponderous and strident, Crawford's argument is both timely and passionate.

Kirkus Reviews