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    How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
    How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
    How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
    Audiobook8 hours

    How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

    Written by Jenny Odell

    Narrated by Rebecca Gibel

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A galvanizing critique of the forces vying for our attention-and our personal information-that redefines what we think of as productivity, reconnects us with the environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world

    Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity . . . doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance.

    So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Odell sees our attention as the most precious-and overdrawn-resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.

    Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we hear so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent.

    Editor's Note

    Self-care in the age of chaos…

    Self-care in this time of uncertainty and social-distancing has never been more important, and Jenny Odell reminds us that the best way to be a valuable person and citizen is to be thoughtful about our attention and where we direct it. A timely read to reconnect with yourself and refocus on what’s most important to you in life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateMay 7, 2019
    ISBN9781684573929
    How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

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    Reviews for How to Do Nothing

    4/5

    421 ratings16 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Attention economy steals our minds, how valuable that we could gain our own attention back!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Thoughtful and thought provoking. I pay more attention t the birds now.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A slow read that requires listening more than once, reading more than once and please do! It has so much to consider, to ponder about — give yourself all the time, buddy read/listen to it with a friend... I can’t recommend it enough!!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      At some point in the middle, this book seems to devolve into an unordered list of art pieces this author enjoyed.

      While that's a fine topic for a book, it's not really what this one seems to be trying to advertise itself as.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A wonderful book which impacted my own behavior and social media consumption habits. The title is a bit misleading as the book’s focus is really the attention economy. It covers the risks, design mechanics, and provides a pretty broad ranging review of social interactions in the modern era. It also touches on art and bird watching, an additional humanizing touch about the importance of slowing down which I enjoyed. As a technologist, I found the book an important read which accurately echoes and elaborates on the concerns many in the industry have, practices we apply to our own lives and those of our families (eg limiting screen time). I have been recommending it to colleagues and friends.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book is both urgent and deeply restive. A must-read!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Strong argument, but entirely too much anecdotal evidence from the author's own life. There is a good point to be made here, but must be made with more reliance on data.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Best for:Those who are interested in being more intentional with their time and attention.In a nutshell:Artist and author Odell explores ways to be more intentional with our time, and how that relates to community and environment.Worth quoting:“That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribably detail of the real.”“The impulse to say goodbye to it all, permanently, doesn’t just neglect our responsibility to the world that we live in; it is largely unfeasible, and for good reason.”“What is needed, then, is not a ‘once-and-for-all’ type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.”Why I chose it:The cover kept jumping out at me in bookshops, and then I read something where this was recommended, so figured that was enough to pick it up.Review:This is one of those books where the ‘worth quoting’ section could have gone on for pages and pages. Odell is a talented writer, and the book is filled with poetic phrases and insightful paragraphs that get the reader thinking critically about one’s place in the world, the choices one makes, and the impact one has on the community and environment around them.The book is laid out in six strong chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter, ‘A Case for Nothing,’ makes the argument that we need the space in between, the silence, to think and live and contemplate. And while this ‘nothing’ is often seen as a luxury, she argues that it shouldn’t be - that we all need this time and ability to not have to be productive, to be active, to be consuming.The second chapter explores the sort of knee-jerk reaction I know that I’ve seen in books that might be considered similar to this one - lets just leave it all behind and retreat forever. But Odell points out that not only is this not feasible for most, it’s not actually what we should be doing, because we owe something to our communities and to those we would leave behind.From there, her third chapters explores different ways that people have exercised their right and need to withdraw their attention from where the current economy demands we focus it: social media, capitalism, overall ‘productivity’ in the sense of doing doing doing. After making the case of ways to fight against these strains on our time and attention, she then spends a chapter exploring how to engage our attention in other ways. It’s not about finding the right app to limit screen time; it’s about being intentional and recognizing that where we fix our attention creates our reality.The last parts of the book focus on community, environment, space and time. I could be more specific, but I’m still processing what I’ve read. I didn’t expect the book to look so heavily at environment and ecology, but that is a consistent theme, and the fact that Odell is an avid bird-watchers plays heavy into the analogies she provides. She then wraps up discussing the idea she calls ‘manifest dismantling;’ that is, looking at ways communities have deconstructed the mistakes of their place that have disconnected them from nature and the world around them. I think my review might suggest this book is all over the place, but it’s not. There’s just so much to contemplate, it’s one of those books that I would have loved to read as part of a book club so we could have discussed each chapter in depth. Regardless, I know this one will stick with me.Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:Keep
    • 2/5
      I'm really not completely sure how I felt about this book, which came highly recommended by people I trust. Part of it was reading it during the Covid-19 pandemic; I initially put it on hold in January, but between demand and library closure, I didn't get it till the end of July. If I had read it before March, I might be kinder to it.

      The book's title isn't entirely accurate. This isn't a how to book, and it's not really dedicated to technology or even being anti-technology. It's a meandering philosophical treatise on the meaning of attention to time and space. There's a lot of research and sources packed in to a book of only 204 pages, and between that and the loose structure, there's a very breadth over depth feel to it. My other problem is that I didn't particularly like the author as she presented herself in this book. She started off on the wrong foot by writing her introduction in the style of a PhD dissertation and used jargon and buzzwords unnecessarily. I enjoyed the book far more when she stepped back and let her stories speak for themselves.

      I'm one of those people who uses social media too much since I'm a news hound, and I try not to take critiques too personally, but even so, I found her approach somewhat condescending and in places contradictory. She criticizes the idea of "ethical persuasion," but part of her issue is that she feels it rejects her personal agency and responsibility. Without turning people into mindless automatons, I wish she would have engaged with the idea of power imbalance in tech. We are not powerless to delete the Facebook app, but the playing field is not level--we are drawn in and in some cases compelled to use social media to some extent (and that ignores the behind the scenes activity that makes it near-impossible to avoid Facebook, Amazon, and Google completely). At times I felt she lacked empathy: it may seem silly to her that a man would choose only to eat at chain restaurants, but it would have been more interesting if she had explored his fear of loss of control and why someone wouldn't be open to new experiences, rather than simply judging them or, in the case of gentrifying residents, simply ascribing it to an individualistic culture.

      I have mixed feelings about social media myself, but she focuses too much on its negatives without seeing the ways in which social media's positive and negative sides can be mirror images of each other. My teenage daughter is far better informed about social and political issues than I was at her age, when I had to rely on print media. The flip side, of course, is that teens can also wind up on alt-right sites. Social media can enable genuine friendships and exchange of information, especially amongst far flung groups or people with disabilities. On the other hand, curated social media personalities can lead to the worst kind of competition.

      A great deal of her ideas rely on physical space, which makes the timing unfortunate--it's very nice to suggest in person action but at the moment, putting that into place is impossible! Obviously I can't entirely fault her for that. Despite her railing against our economy and lack of time earlier, she didn't make as many connections at the end to why people don't choose to take that step into concrete action. Based on her earlier chapters I can't believe she doesn't know why, so pinning it onto personal choices here seems to miss part of the big picture.

      Despite all this criticism, I don't think I regret reading the book. There's a germ of something here; I just don't agree with where she takes it.
    • 1/5
      Another book spawned by the shock of the 2016 US Presidential election, and the “personal crisis” it caused for the author.

      Obvious observations treated as revelations. The author never neglects to remind us that she is “an artist” as if that is supposed to add credibility.
    • 4/5
      Surprisingly insightful at times, but pretentious and narrow in several spots. There are more possibilities in the internet than are dreamt of in our current social media...so not sure how this will age. Enjoyed the discussion of context-seeking as a survival skill.
    • 4/5
      The title of this book is misleading. It is not about how to do nothing. It is not a how-to book, and contains no instructions. It is about resisting the attention economy, but it is actually about the benefits of focusing your energy elsewhere. A better title would have been "How paying attention to the world around you is good for you and the world."The book is a critique of capitalism, and how capitalism has affected our brains, bodies, and even our sense of self. Under capitalism, time is money, and if we aren't being "productive" we are "wasting time." Capitalism encourages us to be productive during all of our waking hours, and even wants us to limit our sleeping hours so that we can be more productive. Even our leisure time has been hijacked by social media networks that want us to keep scrolling and clicking so they can collect more data about us. This not only leaves us feeling scatterbrained and exhausted, it erodes our sense of self and untethers us from our physical environment. Odell's practice of "doing nothing" is a means of anti-capitalist resistance: she doesn't advocate for literally doing nothing, but for not measuring the productivity of our time, and instead valuing the time we spend simply observing the world around us.Odell doesn't advocate for "disconnecting" from the internet - she acknowledges that although that can be beneficial, it's not sustainable in the long term, and it requires a certain amount of privilege to be able to do it at all. Instead, she recommends that we simply start noticing the world around us. She focuses on the natural world: by paying genuine attention to birds, the smell of the air, what flowers are in season, we can more closely inhabit our physical world. Learning about local flora and fauna helps us understand our place in the environment. Paying attention to the people around us gives us opportunity to become a part of a community that is based on physical proximity. Paying attention to our immediate physical world is also an act of rebellion against the "attention economy" - the capitalist internet that makes money off our clicks.Paying attention to the world around us is also away to escape the filter bubbles that we encounter on the internet, in our social lives, and at work. It helps us to see and understand that there is more diversity around us than capitalism would have us believe. It gives us context to understand what is happening around us, and helps us become better citizens of our world.Odell has a lot of important things to say, and she imparts a sense of urgency around reclaiming your own mind and your own time from capitalism. She briefly acknowledges that her stance comes from a place of privilege, but I would have liked to see her discuss this more: is this variety of doing nothing even feasible for someone who is working long hours in gig jobs to scrape together a meager income? Does it have the same benefits for them as for a middle-class artist? What happens to capitalism if an entire society decides to do nothing? Even though she doesn't address these questions, this is an excellent work with lots of food for thought.
    • 5/5
      How to Do Nothing delivers everything I want in a non-fiction book. Most importantly, it gives a distinct perspective I haven't seen elsewhere in such thoughtful form. It explains the importance of its sub-title and theme, "Resisting the Attention Economy," and then shows us how to do so. Odell is creative in her storytelling and precise in her word choice. From the first few pages, I knew I was embarking on an intelligent, enjoyable conversation. One idea that has especially stuck with me is about how our modern media is so jarring because everything comes at us without any context. In the course of a physical day, you can talk politics with your friends over morning coffee, then hear productivity tips at work, then talk sports over lunch, and then see lots of marketing at the mall on the way home. In social media, all of those subjects come at you in random bits, without the filtering of you choosing the who, when and where. Social media is engineered to make us consume more. We need to find ways to consume it less. Odell has done so with off-grid retreats and finding natural spaces (often involving birds, which also resonated with me, who even has the same Sibley guide on my nearby shelf). This book is an articulate critique delivered in the long form that we need.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed this, although feels a little bitty and fragmented. Essentially the encouragement of mindful living and ways to engage with the world outside of social media and the internet - it's ok to sit in the park and just enjoy the birds. Odell helpfully acknowledges that the common refrain to delete your Facebook is both privileged and not always possible so her approach is more interesting than other, more "self-help" books I've seen.
    • 4/5
      Perhaps I'm already doing what the author proposes by stubbornly reading all these books in actual print. It is nice to slowly and aimlessly enjoy something even if it offers no remuneration or credentialing, and that's her point. It won't surprise you to hear Odell is an artist first, and this bit of unconventional writing reminds you of that.
    • 3/5
      Oddly, this book that was just released in 2019 already feels dated. It could be that the Covid-19 pandemic made the author's arguments for turning out and turning on seem less urgent than when it was published. She writes well, tells several stories about the ways capitalism became powerful on the backs of regular workers and the seemingly never-ending battle to get more personal time. It's all a fair read, but falls a little flat at this period of our history.