A few weeks of Doing Nothing with Jenny Odell
This week I take a look at Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing"
Kia ora,
This week on Field Notes I reviewed How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. A book that was first brought to my attention by Gordana Rodden when she shared a few of her reading habits and recommendations.
“How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell
For something titled How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell’s 2019 book doesn’t have many answers on how to actually “do nothing”. Although it may sound like one, I wouldn’t consider it to be a self-help book. It doesn’t give you twelve easy ways to ditch social media and live a life more grounded in reality. It might be better described as an exploration of the perils and possibilities of the internet and social media.
It’s easy to go on and on about the evils of social media, the problems are numerous after all. Books such as this can easily feel like a long lecture, but Odell instead presents her problems with social media and then turns to an exploration of answers rather than critiques. Her issues with social media are well established—its lack of context, how it’s designed to be addictive, and how it encourages shouting rather than listening.
Odell says, “the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”
Her answer, perhaps surprisingly, is not just to be rid of social media. She goes into great depth describing the communes of the 1960s and how they show, “there is no escaping the political fabric of the world.” Odell argues it is not about whether to use social media but how. When it comes to this question of how to use social media, Odell present’s more questions than answers. Both how individuals can change the way they use social media and how social media can change to better serve individuals and their communities.
Perhaps the most compelling argument in the book is how the internet has affected our working lives and what it means to be productive. Being constantly connected means that people take their work home with them. It’s common to fear that if you are not doing something to grow your wealth, image, or skills then you are wasting time. She argues that if we are constantly trying to be productive and grow then we are neglecting the maintenance and care our bodies and minds need.
“In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative,” Odell says.
Odell is an artist and writer who is based in Oakland, California, a city that features heavily in the book. She writes a lot about Bioregionalism—noticing the natural aspects of the land around you. What trees and birds are commonly found in your area? What way do the streams run through your suburb? This is an aspect of her book that I found particularly interesting and actionable. The idea that you only see what you are looking for, or hear what you are listening for. You notice a birdsong, and then you can’t stop hearing it. Or you learn a new word and all of a sudden it appears to be used everywhere. One of the negative aspects of social media is that it removes you from the physical world around you. Paying a little more attention to your surroundings can go a long way to stopping yourself from being consumed by social media.
In the end, Odell offers a simple yet poignant argument about where and how our attention should be focused. “A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough.”
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Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!