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Other writers have excoriated the distractions of ubiquitous technology and advertising. But Matthew Crawford seeks a deep philosophical perspective. He has a background in physics and political science, and is now at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In The World Beyond Your Head, he explores how we got to what he calls a "crisis of attention". His starting onslaught is no less challenging a task than an assault on the "Enlightenment self", because, it seems, it is the isolated self that permits distraction.
Immanuel Kant is frequently taken to be the epitome of the 18th-century philosophical Enlightenment, and Crawford blames him for constructing its notion of the self as an isolated being for whom true knowledge can arise only from solo enquiry.
He spreads the blame to the 17th century – to John Locke, the font of liberal thought, and to René Descartes, who said that the only thing he couldn't doubt was that there was something, a self, doing the doubting.
Oddly missing is any discussion of another key Enlightenment figure: Adam Smith, who theorised capitalism as an economy of atomised individuals making rational choices in a social vacuum. "Freedom" and "choice" are the mantras of capitalism. Even though "we often assume that diversity is a natural upshot of free choice", Crawford says, "the market ideal of choice... tends toward a monoculture of human types: the late modern consumer self." As an example, he describes how lobbyists for casino gambling "tap into the deep psychology of autonomy" to make it seem that submitting to the engineered attention-grabbing of gambling is a human right.
All this introduces us to one of Crawford's key proposals for dealing with the crisis: to shift our focus from the lonesome atomised individual to truly shared attention. The current fashion for the "wisdom of crowds" is not true sharing, but rather the market mining individuals. As he writes, "there is a lot more money to be made as an aggregator of 'content' than as a producer of it".
Crawford's core message is that we should stop focusing on ourselves and move towards true sharing. "Involve your ass, your mind will follow," he says. He commends to us the "flow" he feels when riding motorbikes, when his derrière is deeply involved in his need to pay attention. He feels it too in his workshop, making motorbike parts and solving problems with others. In particular, he says, we should value education as a face-to-face apprenticeship in the ways of investigating and of making, through attention shared in person. He gives as an example learning to build a pipe organ, with the person who has to repair it in 400 years' time in mind.
You will find a much gentler and more literary exploration of the ills of distraction in the musings of Laurence Scott, who teaches creative writing at Arcadia University in London.
In The Four-Dimensional Human, Scott reaches out not into space-time, but into the 20th-century literary imagination's grasping for something outside the mundane three dimensions.
His account of what is becoming of us is often beautiful even if unnerving at times, such as when he evokes the web pages that come alive on anniversaries of their owners' deaths. It is certainly worth our attention.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Take a look at your self"
Mike Holderness writes about science, technology and philosophy