The Crisis of Attention: From Enlightenment to iPad

Recently, my father, who has worked in technology education for a long time, texted me a picture from an airport restaurant in which he was eating. In the picture, a waiter stood at a table waiting for a family of six to finish looking at their iPads. Each person had bent his or her head to stare at the iPad screen, ignoring one another and the waiter.

According to Matthew Crawford in his wonderful new book The World Beyond Your Head, we now face a cultural crisis of attention, an inability to focus on the things beyond our heads. While it may at first appear that this crisis has been caused by technology, Crawford, the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, traces the genealogy of this crisis to a source that some readers might find surprising: Enlightenment philosophy—specifically its attempt to free human beings from dependence on external authority.

Crawford’s explanation begins with John Locke..