Economie en maatschappij
Tekst 1: The world beyond your head. How to flourish in age of distraction –
Matthew Crawford
Introduction: attention as a cultural problem
*Swiping a bank card to pay -> a person = captive audience: during the interval between swiping the
card, confirming the amount & entering PIN: shown advertisements
such intrusions are everywhere: tray on a seat on a plane, moving handrail on escalator, key card
hotel
capitalism has gotten hip to the fact for all our talk of an information economy, what we really
have is an attentional economy, if the term ‘economy’ applies to what is scarce and therefor valuable
social technology, not something electronic
-> S-Korea: advertisements via sent – Dunkin donuts
*Intrusive advertising is just the tip of a larger cultural iceberg
it’s clear that attention has also becon an acute collective problem of modern life – a cultural
problem
*The way we experience this, often, is a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to
direct where we will & complain about it bitterly
our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more simulation. The content
of it almost becomes irrelevant
*Our distractibility seems to indicate that we’re agnostic on the question of what is worth paying
attention to – that is, what to value
different answers of moralist & sociologist: are both right – question of what to attend to is a
question of what to value & this question is no longer answered for us by settled forms of social life
the downside is that as autonomous individuals we often find ourselves isolated in a fog of choices
– our mental lives become shapeless
*Our mental fragmentation can’t simply be attributed to advertising, the Internet, or any other
identifiable villain, for it has to become something more comprehensive that that, something like a
style of existence.
little sketch (p.6-7): seems about the little tasks that claim his attention, but at the centre of it is
an ethical void. He is unable to actively affirm as important the pleasure of being with friends. He
therefore has no basis on which to resist the colonization of life by hassle.
attention is the organizing concern of the tradition of thought called phenomenology & this
tradition offers a bridge between the mutually uncomprehending fields of cognitive psychology &
moral philosophy. What is required, then, is a highly synthetic effort – we can call it philosophical
anthropology.
*Ethics of attention: would have to being by taking seriously & trying to make sense of, the
qualitative character of first-person experience in our contemporary cognitive environment: by turns
anxious, put-upon, distracted, exhausted, enthralled, ecstatic, self-forgetting.
The attentional commons
*The introduction of novelty into one’s field of view commands what the cognitive psychologists call
an orienting response: an animal turns its face & eyes toward the new thing
images on the screen jump out of the flow of experience & make a demand on us
,*Psychologists have suggested that attention may be categorized by whether it’s goal-driven of
stimulus-driven, corresponding to whether it’s in the service of one’s own will or not
*The orienting response requires of us a concerted effort of executive attention if we’re to resist it,
and our capacity for such resistance is finite
the ever more complete penetration of public spaces by attention-getting technologies exploits
the orienting response in a way that pre-empts sociability, directing us away from one another and
toward a manufactured reality, the content of which is determined from afar by private parties that
have a material interest in doing so
*L’oreal advertisement on security trays -> there’s an ‘inefficient’ use of space that could instead be
used to ‘inform’ the public of ‘opportunities’
justifications of this flavour are so much a part of the taken-for-granted field of public discourse
that they may override our immediate experience and render it unintelligible to us
*In the main currents of psychological research, attention is treated as a resource: a person has only
so much of it
Yet it doesn’t occur to us to make a claim for our attentional resources on our own behalf, nor do
we yet have a political economy corresponding to this resource, one that would take into account
the peculiar violations of the modern cognitive environment.
*Attentional commons
there are some resources that we hold in common e.g. the air we breathe -> we take them for
granted, but their widespread availability makes everything else we do possible
absence of noise = resource of this sort: silence is what makes it possible to think
benefits of silence are off the books: not measured directly by any econometric instrument, yet
the availability surely contributes to creativity & innovation
air & water will be used by some in ways that make them unusable for others – not bc they’re
malicious or careless, but bc they can make money using them this way => transfer of wealth from
‘the commons’ to private parties
silence is now offered as a luxury good cfr. Business-class -> as the commons get appropriated
one solution for those who have the means, is to leaver the commons for private clubs
when some people treat the minds of other people as a resource, this isn’t ‘creating wealth’
it’s transferring it
this becomes especially pertinent in the era of big data, when we find ourselves the objects of
attention-getting techniques that aren’t not only pervasive, but increasingly well targeted
*Attention is the thing that is most one’s own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay
attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us, what is actually present to
our consciousness.
but it’s also true that our attention is directed to a world that is shared; one’s attention isn’t not
simply one’s own, for the simple reason that its object are often present to others as well
moral imperative to pay attention to world, and not get locked up in your own head
one of the more interesting findings to come out of the research on distracted driving is that,
while having a cell phone conversation impairs driving ability, having a conversation with someone
present in the car doesn’t. A person who is present can cooperate by modulating the conversation
in response to the demands of the driving situation
*The idea of a commons is suitable in discussing attention bc 1. The penetration of our consciousness
by interested parties proceeds very often by the appropriation of attention in public space & 2. Bc we
rightly owe to one another a certain level of attentiveness and ethical care
, The ascetics of attention
*S. Weil & W. James both suggested that the struggle to pay attention trains the faculty of attention;
it’s a habit built up through practice
*The ability to control oneself in the face of some temptation is greatly enhanced by, indeed seems
simply to be, the ability to direct one’s attention toward something else.
*Experiment with kids -> 1 marshmallow or 2 after 15 min the researcher’s interpretation of their
results is that it isn’t willpower that distinguishes the successful children, it’s the ability to
strategically allocate their attention so that their actions aren’t determined by the wrong thoughts
without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to hose who
would direct our attention where they will
Individuality
*The media have become masters at packaging stimuli in ways that our brain find irresistible
stimulation begets a need for more stimulation; without it one feels antsy, unsettled
a consequence of this is that we’re becoming more alike
*There’s a large cultural consequence to our ability to concentrate on things that aren’t immediately
engaging, or our lack of such ability: the persistence of intellectual diversity, or not
*According to the prevailing notion, to be free means to be free to satisfy one’s preferences
the mutually reinforcing set of posits about freedom & rationality provides the basic framework
for the discipline of economics and for ‘liberal theory’ in departments of political science
in surveying contemporary life, it’s hard not to notice that this catechism doesn’t describe our
situation very well
the resolutely individualistic understanding of freedom & rationality we have inherited from the
liberal tradition disarms the critical faculties we need most in order to grapple with the large-scale
societal pressures we now face
*One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures;
We can take a critical stance toward our own activities & aspire to direct ourselves toward objects
and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying
(cfr. Native Americans)
the transformation of the Native American lifeworld, like the transformation currently under way
in our attentional environment, points up the limitations of the idea of individual self-determination
and of exhortations to exert more self-control. We’re in it together. This makes this political
Achieving a coherent self
*we’re wired to attend to our environment, but certain kinds of thinking require that we ignore it
suppressing the environment is dangerous bc features of the environment that normally should
be controlling action are ignored
*Around the age of 2-3 years, as a child develops language, she learns to use narrative to organize
and relate her experiences. By doing so, she starts to develop a coherent concept of self
*It’s safe to say that our ability to suppress the environment is under greater pressure than it once
was
*Is something important to human flourishing at risk or not?
1. What we really mean when we say that human beings tell stories and seek coherence is that we do
things for reasons. We offer these reasons up to others (and ourselves) in language.
