The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that 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 therefore valuable. As these last examples illustrate, the pertinent development here is a social technology, not something electronic. Turning unavoidable public surfaces into sites of marketing isn’t inherently “digital.”