Summary: The World Beyond Your Head

In our modern times, social media and the Internet are constantly at our fingertips taking up our attention. Information overload is a common occurrence in our society, especially within our younger generations. With the advancement of technology and easy access to news outlets, it is hard to focus our attention on just one activity. The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford discusses the current world we live while comparing our modern scenarios to certain situations, comparing it to certain philosophical ideologies and the overall Enlightenment movement. Crawford also investigates the extreme focus of ice hockey players, motorcyclists, chefs, the behavior of gambling addicts, the common hurdles of daily life, and the building of pipe
Crawford wants to highlight the fact that even though technologies such as the iPhone and the Internet impact the way we currently live our lives, it does not hold complete responsibility for our collective distractibility. He ties in our collective distractibility with the Enlightenment movement of the 17th century when philosophers John Locke and Immanuel Kant argued that what we experience is not reality, but inner variations and representations of our own reality placed into our private minds. While the outside version of reality is filled with rules and authority figures, our inner private minds is free and holds no constraints like that in the outside. According to Crawford, the Enlightenment was the time when people in society decided to detach from one another. Throughout the book, Crawford talks about experts in their chosen fields and how they manage to complete what they do. He mentions that as we grow up from being a child to an adult, we acquire skills by studying one another and learning from what those around us
He refers to attentional commons as the spaces, times, and fields of practice which are silent, or non-programmed, or resistant to marketing or any other sort of mass structuring or expectations of behaviors. Crawford traces the roots of this to the consequences of liberal individualism, both that of Locke and Kant. He argues that, in having accepted an account of the world which privileges above all our own private interpretation of the representations we receive through our senses and through our own critical faculties, we all suffer from constant stress and confusion. The liberation from social authority, and the structuring of our grasp of the world such that everyone may be subject to criticism and doubt, obviously empowered enormous technological and personal discoveries, but also made us constantly looking for ways to abstract and universalize everything, since encounters with that which cannot be reduced to a representation only reminds us of the limits of our