Fighting for attention in the age of distraction
Author Matthew B. Crawford on seeking relief from the relentless intrusions of the modern world
“Silence is this thing that we take for granted, kind of like clean air and clean water, which makes it possible to think.” MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD
Matthew B. Crawford takes a paper napkin off the restaurant table and folds it, first by length, then by width, to demonstrate the challenges of shaping sheet metal.
He’s fabricating custom motorcycle parts these days, putting compound curves in metal, and pulls out his smart- phone to show the photo of a side cover he recently manufactured for a Honda CB750 to protect wires and battery.
At his shop at home in Richmond, Va., “the capital of the Confederacy,” Crawford typically works alone, usually in silence. Sometimes he’ll have music playing, but only songs without lyrics.
Words, he finds, get inside his head and distract him.
It’s that subject — the virtues and limits of human attention, the relentless intrusions of a modern economy that almost never shuts up — that’s the focus of Crawford’s new book, The World Beyond Your
Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.
“Attention really is the resource that drives the contemporary economy,” he told the Star in an interview.
And calculated distraction, he argues, is a sort of “new frontier of capitalism that’s been opened up by our self-appointed disrupters, where the point is to dig up and monetize every bit of private headspace.”
Increasingly, in more and more environments, the invasion is such that “our attention isn’t really ours to direct as we want,” he says.
The idea for the book gained momentum the day Crawford swiped a bank card to pay for groceries and, in the seconds between confirming the amount and entering his PIN, he was confronted with advertisements.
It’s the sort of thing that’s now everywhere: on screens on the back of airplane seats, at gas station pumps while you fill up, on the risers of stairs in public transit stations. Public space is being inexorably appropriated by advertisers bidding for our attention, Crawford says.
Quiet places that might have provided opportunity for thought or sociability are instead co-opted by Muzak. Everywhere, from restaurants to ballparks to casinos, there are attempts to control our moods.
These intruders are masterful, he writes, “at packaging stimuli in ways that our brains find irresistible, just as food engineers have become expert in creating ‘hyper-palatable’ foods by manipulating levels of sugar, fat and salt. Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.”
Crawford says the “resource we’re talking about here is attention. Silence is this thing that we take for granted, kind of like clean air and clean water, which makes it possible to think, which is no small thing.”
Instead, silence has become a luxury good, he says, available inside business-class airport lounges and spas and the like, while in common areas the cacophony roars.
Crawford, 49, exploded into the firmament of public intellectuals as a sort of philosopher-mechanic with the publication in 2009 of the engaging bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.
He had acquired a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and landed a job in a thinktank, but it was only after boredom with that drove him to open a motorcycle repair shop that he learned to think, he said.
On one level, Crawford’s latest book flowed from the extraordinary success of the first.
“It completely turned my life upside down. I went from being an absolute anonymous non-entity to this kind of little-book celebrity,” he says.
“So my own attention — I was getting pinged at constantly, with opportunities, really, it’s not something to complain about — but it felt like my attention wasn’t simply mine to direct as I wanted, as it had always been before.”
He grew irritable. That irritability led to attentiveness.
“I was wandering around and being pissed off all the time and then trying to make sense of why I’m so pissed off all the time. Then the more you start digging into it, you start seeing that there are deep and serious reasons for it.
“How did it become the norm to saturate every place with Muzak? I don’t think it’s in response to demand, what economists called the ‘revealed preference.’ When I talk about it with people, they almost invariably say, ‘Yeah, I wish I could find a quiet place.’ ”
No place has become more altered over recent decades than sports arenas and stadiums.
Where once a crowd assembled, reacted to events before their eyes and created the mood in their shared reaction to what unfolded before them, now such places are dens of noise, overwrought mood-scripting and saturation advertising.
We’ve become inured, Crawford says, to our moods being managed and manipulated in such ways and to our attention being hijacked in all sorts of public spaces.
Once he began investigating the phenomenon, he found it difficult, in fact, to put bounds around it, discovering ramifications in psychology, sociology, economics and the roots of human thought.
That’s where his academic training kicks in. And the book is dense in places. Crawford is nobody’s idea of a beach read.
But the practical side of his life — the occasional “psychodrama” of raising two daughters, his ongoing immersion in motorcycle mechanics — also keeps it grounded in less ethereal concepts and in contemporary pop culture.
Part of his work, after all, is paying attention to the world around him, the world beyond his head.
Those Honda covers go, by the way, for about $400 a pop.