Tag: Jenny Odell

Read How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell provides a critique of our current state of affairs, where even our attention has been capitalised upon through our use of technology.

In reality, Odell’s book is a critique of the dystopian current state of affairs, where even our attention has been capitalised upon through our use of social media. Odell’s book is an anti-capitalist challenge to social media, advertising, and the hyper-accelerated news cycle that dominates our lives. Though Odell is not anti-technology, she argues that the current state of technologies, specifically the monetisation of our attention through social media, is disrupting our ability to create physical communities and negatively affecting how we express ourselves. Counter to positive discourses about social media and the free speech it supposedly affords us, Odell posits that the addictive social media scene curbs our right to not express ourselves, depriving us of longer thought-processes, maintenance work, and community building.

Source: Revolutionary (Un)Productivity: a review of Jenny Odell’s ‘How to Do Nothing’ by Nicole Froio

In response, she collects together a range of ideas paying better attention to the world around.

It is not about logging off so much as a non-prescriptive guide to nudging yourself into caring about things that are not on your phone. Not because it is a moral good or will make you a well-rounded person, but because it’s soothing and enriching and fun.

Source: How to Do Something by Meaghan O’Connell

Bringing together ideas from thinkers, such as Haraway, Deleuze, Jamieson, James, Benjamin and Solnit, the book is more of a meditation, rather than a rigid guide, for how to do something more meaningful, human and interesting.

Her book is also worth reading for the ways in which it follows one person’s path toward liberation: As a deeply connected subject of the Internet, she shows us how she has found some peace.

Source: Jenny Odell and the Quest to Log Off by Kevin Lozano

Continue reading “📚 How to Do Nothing – Resistance to the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell)”

Bookmarked How to quit Facebook without quitting Facebook (Vox)

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing makes the case for keeping your Facebook account, staying on Twitter, checking your email, but doing it all differently, and “not as asked.” (And not as self-help.)

Kaitlyn Tiffany interviews Jenny Odell about her book How to Do Nothing. Rather than leaving social media, Odell encourages us to be more aware. This is similar to what I was trying to capture in my post on being ‘informed’. Odell also discusses the idea of ‘social media’ as a public utility that does not depend upon cashing in on our attention. I just wonder if a state-based solution leads to what China has in place? Maybe the alternative is a decentralized solution? I am not sure.

Marginalia

For my purposes, the attention economy is as simple as the buying and selling of attention. There’s the micro, literal version of that, which is “engagement,” a measure of how much time someone spends in an app and how much they engage with it. But I think a broader definition of the attention economy is kind of like — as I personally experience it — I exist in space with a heightened anxiety and sensitivity all the time, even when I’m not literally engaging with any of these apps. And that then contributes to the way I am using them and how often I’m using them.

Do anything that can help you stand outside of yourself. And see what you’re doing. I feel like that’s common knowledge in therapy and a lot of addiction therapy, right? Seeing what you’re doing is the first step. It’s this process that detaches you a little bit. It’s from that perspective that you’re able to remember what is actually important to you. Or realize that you don’t know what’s important to you, which is an important thing to know about, if that’s true. But otherwise, you’re stuck in this tiny loop, and getting out of it, even if it’s really brief, that’s still way better than nothing, I think. Realizing that life goes on, away from this stuff.