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

In The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, Matthew Crawford examines the concept of attention as embodied in moral philosophy, political philosophy and psychology, a concept which has a special pertinence to the history of craft. In comparison to Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which dealt with with the deskilling of manual work, this book consists of reflections on attention and alienation in cultural history. Drawing on behavioral economics, cognitive sciences, neuroeconomics, and psychology, issues concerning manual competence are generalized to become issues concerning autonomy, individuality, self-determination, situatedness, and subjectification. Crawford attempts to re-draft concepts of impaired subject–object relationships regarded as caused by a state of crisis in the modern attention span. For Crawford, this crisis is not only triggered by technological development, but is a problem of political economy in general. His investigation rests on the research question—is the concept of “attention” still relevant for the self-conception of today’s craftmakers? Characterizations of craft and craftsmanship, Crawford suggests, are nothing but auxiliary constructions for explaining the fact that certain skilled practices, as diverse as, for example, cooks, ice hockey players, motor cyclists, jazz musicians, glass blowers, and organ builders, establish a form of