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Wim Wenders, in “Written in the West” — his most excellent book of photographic research for his film, Paris, Texas — writes:
Solitude and taking photographs are connected in an important way. If you aren't alone, you can never acquire this way of seeing, this complete immersion in what you see, no longer needing to interpret, just looking.
...
If you're not alone you take different photos. I rarely feel the urge to take pictures if I’m not on my own.
Stop giving away your work to people who don’t care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.
I don’t read a lot of philosophy, but I found Crawford’s book here timely, deeply considered and very profound. He takes a thoughtful approach to how one constructs an authentic life in a world surrounded by “choice architects” that mediate our experiences through technology.Blair Reeves added,
It's come to my attention that people spend considerable amounts of their day looking at other people's thoughts on social media. I did this for a while myself, but I found that it left little room for my own thoughts and, call me selfish, but I value those more, so I stopped. And this was some time ago, when services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were considerably more innocent than they are today.
All of which is a long-winded way to say that I very much agree with Michael Crawford's premise in this book: that our attention is a precious resource and that we need to actively protect it, or risk losing it to politico-corporate interests.
Crawford isn't some attention blogger though, and this is not a self-help book. It's a book of philosophy more than anything, and it's central premise isn't just that you should reclaim your attention, but that your best bet to reclaim your attention is through a culture of traditional craftsmanship and hands-on activities. Crawford isn't suggesting you close that Facebook tab so much as you close your laptop and go do something physical, with your hands rather than your mind.
Much of the book is spent on a deep dive through into various communities where excellence and even competence comes only through apprenticeship with experts and, wait for it, hard work. And that last bit is why I propose, most people will not like this book. Among the things Crawford looks at in some detail are glasswork, engines (Crawford owns, or did own, a motorcycle repair shop), and most interesting to me, pipe organs.
More than anything, The World Beyond Your Head is a wonderfully well-thought out rebuttal to the argument that technology drive culture. It doesn't. Humans drive culture. Human activity, human skill, human excellence, drive culture. In the end, for Crawford, this mis-centering, this hyper-focus on technology, is the real cause of our mis-placed attention and it is going to take real work to free ourselves from it.
>What I have found is that once you recognize the "choice architects" for what they are, you begin to see them everywhere. They are the sites you visit, the networks you use, right down to the form factor of device that is your internet portal. The internet is inherently a mediated platform, after all, and there’s just no getting away from any filter whatsoever. In the real world, you can’t just Richard Stallman your way through the internet. Thus, it becomes a question of making the right choices to maximize your agency and take what control of your internet experience any one person can.
If you're looking for an easy answer to your own attention problems, you won't find it here. If, however, you want to spend some time taking a deep dive into the *other* things you could be doing with your time, I highly, highly recommend this book (and along with it Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, which played no small part in convincing me that it was worthwhile to try to understand and maintain an 1969 Dodge 318 engine).
which ruminates on the value of engaging with the physical world in one’s work. The dude is both a philosophy professor and owns his own motorcycle repair shop in Richmond.
A lot to absorb in this book, but two parts that really resonated with me: Crawford points to our attention itself as a precious resource (which it is), and describes how protecting it against politico-corporate imperatives to seize it helps construct ourselves intentionally.
In addition: he goes into some lengths discussing the cultures of traditional craftsmanship in fields like glasswork, pipe organs and engine mechanics, in which, technological progress aside, real excellence is achieved only in a community of expert practitioners.
“The World Beyond Your Head” was, to me, a powerful rebuttal to the mantra of technology as the chief driver of human progress and a mis-centering of the modern self. I strongly recommend it.
The internet’s slow transformation from a collection of communities into just another media platform has lots of causes, and is not wholly a bad thing. After all, media platforms should exist on the internet. The problem is that passive consumption as a primary mode of engagement turns the user into a product to be securitized and sold, exactly as Facebook does and many others aspire to. It leads to an algorithmization of the online experience that, aside from removing individual agency, is also frequently manipulated into promoting whatever wacky, far-out craziness “performs” well in your given demographic. (As a 30-something white guy, I can attest that the portals into alt-righty Trumpism basically follow me around the internet.)
"What I have found is that once you recognize the “choice architects” for what they are, you begin to see them everywhere. They are the sites you visit, the networks you use, right down to the form factor of device that is your internet portal. The internet is inherently a mediated platform, after all, and there’s just no getting away from any filter whatsoever. In the real world, you can’t just Richard Stallman your way through the internet. Thus, it becomes a question of making the right choices to maximize your agency and take what control of your internet experience any one person can."
@BlairReeves
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