The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew B. Crawford
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The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew B. Crawford
Free PDF Ebook The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew B. Crawford
A groundbreaking new book from the bestselling author of Shop Class as SoulcraftIn 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, by Matthew B. Crawford- Amazon Sales Rank: #79116 in Books
- Brand: Crawford, Matthew B.
- Published on: 2015-03-31
- Released on: 2015-03-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.41" h x 1.19" w x 6.24" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review
“Crawford’s greatest service is to spur our thought, to enjoin his readers to pay attention to the struggle of paying attention. . . . Some of The World Beyond Your Head’s individual chapters approach true excellence . . . In Crawford’s skillful hands . . . examples are far more than irreverent illustrations of philosophy by pop culture; they are illuminations from within of the many ― and often surprising ― connections between philosophy and ideology . . . Books like this gather strands of individual experience, cultural malaise, and philosophical reflection, weaving them together to form braided rope whose tensile strength has the power to lead readers forward, onward, and downward ― from the personal to the cultural to the political by way of the social.” ―Charles Clavey, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“The most cogent and incisive book of social criticism I've read in a long time. Reading it is like putting on a pair of perfectly suited prescription glasses after a long period of squinting one's way through life.” ―Damon Linker, The Week
“[A] brilliant and searching new work of social criticism . . . Crawford proposes a different model of individuality and choice, at once traditional and radically new. Expounding it, with richly informative excursions into neuroscience, experimental psychology, intellectual history, mass culture, skilled crafts, and sports, is the main business of The World Beyond Your Head.” ―George Scialabba, Boston Review
“It's increasingly difficult to pay attention in the blooming, buzzing confusion of the modern world. Matthew Crawford argues persuasively that it's time to fight back . . . Rather than embracing the standard coffee-mug view of philosophy as a repository of sage aphorisms to be summoned while sipping warm beverages, Crawford respects past thinkers enough both to argue with them and to notice their legacies in diverse cultural strata. He clashes with Kant while considering children's cartoons; he sees an ideal from Kierkegaard lurking behind the generic Muzak at a university gym; he uses Hegel to diagnose the contradictions of New Age concepts of self-realization . . . Crawford offers a compelling general framework for the ethics of attention.” ―Nick Romeo, The Daily Beast
“Crawford is really part of a long-term philosophical workshop, all of whose apprentices have tried to find better terms for joining the world than what have been offered by their contemporary socioeconomic regimes. Ruskin and Dewey are part of the shop, as are William James and Jane Addams. I am confident they would happily offer whatever their equivalent would be of a vroom-vroom bike-engine sign of acknowledgment. Through philosophy and storytelling, Crawford has joined their project of loosening the grip of alienation and designed inhumanity. That's a job well done.” ―Michael Roth, The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Educators, politicians, urban planners, interior decorators, and many others would benefit from thinking carefully about the problem Crawford has identified . . . The World Beyond Your Head is an enormously rich book, a timely and important reflection on an increasingly important subject. Pay attention.” ―Ian Tuttle, The New Criterion
“Crawford's diagnosis of our scatterbrained ennui [is] on target, and [The World Beyond Your Head] is peppered with startling insights. One comes when he contrasts Mickey Mouse cartoons of decades past, in which contraptions invariably break down or assault their owners, to the contemporary universe of 'Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,' where gadgets are error-free servants and faithful friends. It's the kind of technological utopianism that primes a young mind to buy whatever Silicon Valley is selling.” ―John Keilman, The Chicago Tribune
“In its exploration of how we come to know ourselves, The World Beyond Your Head harks back to vital debates between humanists like Joseph Wood Krutch and the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, as well as later works by the agrarian social critic Wendell Berry. Readers who know Robert Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will also hear its engines purr in Crawford's work. Like Pirsig, he raises thrilling questions about human nature and calls for a more generous, more diverse definition of excellence.” ―Chris Tucker, The Dallas Morning News
“Persuasive, entertaining-and sometimes disturbing.” ―Sarah Bakewell, The Financial Times
“Crawford 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 world . . . rich in excellent research, argument, and prose.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review
“In the gambling addict, dead broke at the slot machine, Crawford finds the surprising terminus of a way of thinking traceable to Descartes, Kant, and Locke. . . Extending themes of his acclaimed Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford shows how the short-order cook, the welder, the carpenter, the pipe-organ builder all achieve a free individuality by submitting to the authority of mentors who discipline their minds for full engagement with the complexities of the external environment. Those who never mature into this valid individuality, Crawford warns, disappear into a distracted crowd of mindless consumers unable to recognize the distinctions that sustain a vibrant democracy. Worse, such stunted psyches are easy prey for the corporate strategists who hide their predations behind the faux freedoms of the shopping center-and the casino. A cultural inquiry of rare substance and insight.” ―Booklist, starred review
“[Crawford] takes a unique look at attention, positing that it is a commodity . . . 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.” ―Library Journal, starred review
“Fiercely intelligent.” ―The Barnes and Noble Review
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."
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Most helpful customer reviews
66 of 73 people found the following review helpful. Pity the Poor Gym Attendant Who Suffers the Scorn of M.C., or, Do Gyms Play Emo Music Because of Kant? By not me "The World Beyond Your Head" is prodigiously erudite but overloaded with underbaked ideas. It aims to bring phenomenology into conversation with ethics and cultural criticism, and reaches the conclusion that mastery of a skilled craft or practice -- i.e., an activity which forces the craftsman to grapple with objective reality -- may be modern man's best hope for achieving genuine individuality in a world where business interests work overtime to seize control of our attention (before seizing control of our money). That's a powerful idea, and was more or less the thesis of the author's previous book, "Shop Class as Soulcraft." But whereas that book was fleshed out with (often hilarious) vignettes drawn from the motorcycle world and the author's own life, "The World Beyond Your Head" feels very serious. It throws together Big Ideas from philosophy, cognitive science, and social theory, mixes in acerbic cultural commentary, and tops it all off with a profile of a small Virginia firm that makes church organs. The author is clearly a smart dude, and many parts of his book are slap-on-the-forehead brilliant, but the overall argument feels convoluted and underdeveloped, as if the book were a work in progress instead of a finished product. I enjoyed "The World Beyond Your Head" very much, but I wish the author had gotten more help from genuine individuals skilled in the craft of book-editing.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful. A lot to think about here. By William Annis I'm going to be thinking about this book for a while, which in itself is a good thing, even if it is occasionally to argue with it.Interviews with the author are easily found online, so I'm not going to go into what the books about in any detail, but instead make a few particular comments.He places the crisis of attention not at the feet of technology (computers, phones) which is a very nice change for this sort of book. Unfortunately, some public discussions of the book elsewhere have taken it (possibly without reading much of it) and plastered their own technophobia onto it. This is not a Luddite, anti-technology book, but makes more subtle points.The ending is still rather remote. I have no idea how most people, especially those at the lower ends of the economic system, are supposed to put some of the ideas into practice. His discussion of the boy in school convinced into studying trigonometry by relating it to building a race car is barely a start.Still, it's very worth the read.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful. Not Talk Show Self-Help By William B. Harrison in The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew B. Crawford examines the American culture of disembodied work and disembodied electronic communication and finds it shallow and distracting. He constructs his arguments from his own observations, but he supports his positions with ideas from the likes of Emmanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard. He argues for the value of work that brings body and mind together. This is not, however, Alan Watts giving a "Buddha light" homily on watching your breath and tuning in to the senses. While he wants these parts of the self brought together, Crawford's vision comes from the more active pursuits of cooking, motor cycle racing, and pipe organ restoration - active physical pursuits that require training, experience, and active intelligence at work for visible, worldly results.Crawford's first engaging arguments is one for what he calls the "attention commons," public spaces that must be left free from advertising for the sake of our independent minds. I worked at a college where I sometimes needed to get away to a quiet place to grade a stack of papers, and I had a favorite student study lab in another department where nobody knew me. I would work anonymously, facing a large, unbroken gray wall at the room's front. But imagine my dismay when one day I went for the calm lab and the cool, gray wall and found it had been repainted with the school mascot. Glorious red and gold. I hated it, and along with the soothing gray wall went the calm of my own mind as I sat and tried to work. The new mascot felt really intrusive! This is exactly the sort of distraction Crawford brings to our attention as he discusses going through airport security and finding that the bottom of the change bowl at the metal detector had been sold as advertising space to an insurance company. He notes that the security check experience is rattling enough without this added intrusion. He also notes that it is pretty hard (impossible?damn} to think independently or to think at all in an environment given over so completely to advertising and corporate interests.Crawford's observations on the world of Vegas-style, corporation-run gambling are equally insightful, even if you feel the industry should remain relatively free of government constraints. He notes an interesting shift in terminology over the last few decades: "gambling" has become the "gaming industry." During the time of this word shift, casinos have also added daycare for your children. He introduces readers to the phrase "gambling to extinction," words to describe the gaming industry's goal of engineering all elements of a casino - physical layout, placement of cash-out booths, and machine design - to keep a gambler enthralled until he or she spends his last dime. The gambler's resulting tunnel-visioned, hypnotized self has a pretty low value, Crawford says, with a poor quality relationship to the world beyond the head.But then again Crawford's views may not so far from those of the Buddha or Alan Watts as I thought. His stories of the chef relishing the mid-rush scramble in which he must draw on all of his training and his present-moment wits certainly reflects a living ideal of engagement. The author's description of motor cycle racing and the experience gained over time reveals an impressive mastery that only arises after years of work and enjoyment around bikes. His discussion of organ building and restoration gives a glimpse into another world of senses, finely tuned over time, in service of precise results to be presented to the world outside.The World Outside Your Head can be a tough slog in spots. Look at Crawford's summary in the back or pick and choose chapters if you like. Expect insights that may rattle around in your own head and grow larger after you've closed the book. Expect some ideas you may have to finish out yourself. Alan Watts and the Buddha don't think the way Crawford does. They don't argue from the same sources as Crawford, and they don't have the same intellectual context - but somehow, I think they might approve.
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