#StayAtHome: Jenny Odell's "How To Do Nothing"

 

If quitting Facebook forever really isn't an option (and it isn't for most of us), what should you do to avoid doing work for Facebook, Twitter, etc.? By work here, I mean letting the attention economy (pushing the "Like" button, hitting the refresh addictively, and retweeting or resharing the latest outrage) command your attention. Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy" (2019) was written to explore that question. She suggests that the answer is to retrain our attention to notice people and details in our local environment and broader region.

She makes her case through storytelling and theory, ranging from ancient Greek philosophy to the art scene (she is a digital artist by profession), social theory, birding (her hobby), and nature walks. An important insight in the book is that the attention economy produces and relies upon a kind of siloed attention: while people are networked, each person's online experience is profoundly channeled and controlled by algorithms in a way that makes shared experiences nearly impossible. Instead, we have to focus our attention on local people and nature if we want to engage in authentic dialogue, community, and exchange.

Odell is incredibly skilled at weaving together different kinds of knowledge and experience, and she has a gift for explaining art, social theory, and animal behavior in ways that are incredibly accessible to the general reader. This was the December book for the Empire Reading Group, and a great book with which to round out the year.