Talking Tuesday: Crawford and the Attentional Commons

I'm still working through my notes on Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head, but how's about I leave you with a little appetizer to whet your whistle?

A great deal of the book is focused on how our attention is constantly being diverted by external forces, and how those externals have a negative impact on our well being as humans.  Crawford works through a lot of examples of how this plays out, sometimes to devastating consequences.

Writes Crawford:

"Yet, it does not occur to use 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.  Toward this end, I would like to offer the concept of an attentional commons.

There are some resources we hold in common, such as the air we breathe, and the water we drink.  We take them for granted, but their widespread availability makes everything else we do possible.  I think the absence of noise is a resource of just this sort.  More precisely, the valuable thing that we take for granted is the condition of not being addressed."

Crawford notes that the right to not be addressed is being constantly trampled upon by global corporations eager for eyeballs on advertisements; every blank space, every quiet moment is slowly being monetized.  That monetization has a tremendous affect on our ability to attend and self-regulate.  Crawford goes on to say:

"Self-regulation, like attention, is a resource of which we have a finite amount.  Further, the two resources are intimately related.  Thus, if someone is tasked with controlling her impulses for some extended period of time, her performance shortly thereafter on some task requiring attention is degraded.

Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will--to omnipresent purveyors or marshmallows [referring to the famous "marshmallow experiment" of the 1960s]"

~Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, pp 11, 16

Stay tuned--I'm hoping to strategize some ways to reclaim attentional commons, even if only in the home, or in small ways, plus I have a lot more I'd like to write about the book.