How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Jenny Odell
When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as… doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process. more
232 pages, Hardcover
First published Melville House
3.69
Rating
47915
Ratings
5964
Reviews
Jenny Odell
5 books 1627 followers
Community reviews
First, I understand the negative reviews of this book. The title is misleading as this is not at all a how-to on unplugging or leaving social media (for that, maybe read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism or Catherine Price’s How to Break Up With Your Phone). Instead it’s a really well-researched book on some abstract and sometimes seemingly esoteric concepts: the self, attention, bioregionalism, what it means to refuse/resist in place, and the effects of late stage capitalism on all of the above. There is really no how-to in this book, and I don’t think Odell’s work here can be even halfway summarized with buzzwords like “mindfulness” or “digital detox” or whatever. The bulk of this book is about the things that we are unable to do when our attention is tied up in social media or the news cycle. more
full disclosure i literally only had one page left to read in this book but i left my backpack with it inside a chipotle, anyways it still changed my life. more
Collective self-help for middle-class leftist intelligentsia. Has the feeling of taking a leisurely stroll with your loony hippie friend who is at once an overeducated ecosocialist and a crackpot Zen mind-hacker. You have no idea why she loves birdwatching so much (to her it's a proto-spiritual experience, to you it seems superficially like playing Pokémon Go) nor can you figure out how she affords to live on the Oakland-Piedmont border without a full-time job. The slick meta-takeaway is that the very act of reading this book is an exercise in the kind of deliberate anti-productivity that Odell is urging. Can't decide if this is 2 or 4 stars so I'll give it a 3. more
It's hard for me to reconcile that the fundamental things the author talks about in this book: the attention economy, its link to capitalism, how we all need to slow down and think about what we're doing, are all true, and yet the tone is just so smug, lecturing, and talking down at the reader from the lofty heights of liberal academia, as opposed to rooted in the real world where the reader is, with the problem at hand. To give you an idea of one of the sentences: "If we think about what it means to 'concentrate' or 'pay attention' at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented towards the same thing. "Why not just say, "Concentrating means the body and the mind working together". The whole book is like this, very hard to get through, meandering through the author's personal journey and a checklist of philosophers who are too much to take in at times. It's a real shame, because the message, at its core, is very good. more
Woman discovers trees and then shares the experience in a language that the rest of us use to write grant proposals. more
Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || PinterestWhile reading this book, I kept thinking about this article I read once while crammed onto the packed and sweaty train. In one of many social media influencer scandals, a raw vegan lifestyle influencer was coming under fire because she was caught eating a meat dish while out at a restaurant with friends. Needless to say, it was the internet and people were MAD. And yes, you might say that she had every right to eat that meat-- it is her life. But when you are manufacturing your entire brand around the idea that eating meat is bad, and raw vegan is better, the message starts to ring a little false if you don't walk the walk (or veg the veg). more
This was a strange, meandering, prone-to-tangents, quirky book but I really enjoyed it. I think a lot of people would feel that it was too meandering but as an audiobook I liked hearing Odell's thoughts on how the attention economy and hustle culture is affecting our lives. more
Odell has some interesting points but good lord does it seem like she would be exhausting to talk to at a party. more
I found Odell to be a great writer, truly. She has an airy, atmospheric and journalistic tone to her prose, while also imbuing her ideas with an impressive amount of supporting research. However, this book doesn't know what it wants to be - a guide for others, or her personal journaling/thesis on how the author lives her life. The basis on which it was written, at first, is to demonstrate resisting a constant state of capitalist productivity - so the idea presented here is for those of us who have drunk the Kool Aid from the Digital Detox movement, realized that it has its own agenda (making sure your time is well spent. in productivity, of course), and are looking for alternate philosophies to navigating today's murky waters, while insisting fishies pulling us in all possible directions. more
This book is so vital for our generation — we who are more connected than ever before but still more lonely + alienated than ever. Social media / digitization of everyone and everything has fundamentally shifted our understandings of time/space/labor/identity/body and works like this are beginning to account for that and theorize accordingly. Odell takes social media companies to task for competing for our attentiveness + making us invest in the construction of digital worlds all the while the physical world around us falls apart. She is thinking through what it means to reclaim intimacy, connectivity, and resistance amidst the over-saturation of stimulation the Internet age has proliferated (re: think-piece economy). For Odell “silence” and “nothing,” are not absences, they are presences pregnant with possibility. more
A thoughtful, steadying book about the importance of doing nothing in a capitalist culture that always encourages productivity. Instead of providing hard and fast strategies to disengage from work and social media, Jenny Odell offers more of a smart, flowing reflection on the importance of separating ourselves from feeling like we have to work, feeling like we have to broadcast our lives on social media 24/7. She makes lots of astute observations about the monetization of time and the value of our attention, as well as the privilege that comes with the capacity to disconnect from our jobs and from forums like Facebook. She channels her energy into bioregionalism and encourages us to attune ourselves to our direct physical environments. Reading this book felt like going on a serene walk with a smart yet unpretentious friend. more
Reading How to Do Nothing was an odd experience, mostly because I was intensely interested in some sections and was utterly bored through others. It didn't feel coherent, which is weird and unfortunate because Odell obviously put a lot of thought into each chapter. She starts by pointing out that social media and apps that increasingly demand our attention have changed the way we think, work, and spend our time. We aim for productivity, work in a gig economy, and scroll through addictive feeds while simultaneously feeling more worried about and separate from the world around us. After explaining the impossibility of running away completely she touches on ways we can refuse the attention economy, how to open ourselves to new ways of seeing, and the importance of connecting with where we live - its history, ecology, and the fellow humans living there. more
I probably should have sat in silence and watched birds instead of reading this book. There is no thesis here and no new insights. We need to know how to do nothing. Maybe it's for a different generation, but my generation grew up being terribly bored and I honestly do not miss it. . more
So how could it happen that even not within a generation all humans have been transformed into smombies and what happens when someone stops getting permanent outer input and listening to all inner voices and soliloquies. Cleaning silence, awareness for each moment or, ta-da, mindfulness. One must imagine what the extremely slight context to other topics of all this information dump does to brain, logic and mind. The focus that originates from reading a book, working, writing, thinking, etc. doesn´t come in these cases at the cost of real effort, but with easy and sweet intermittent positive reinforcement. more
Cómo no hacer nada me ha sorprendido hasta el final. Viendo el título recuerda a un libro de autoayuda sobre «desconectar» pero dista mucho de eso. Tampoco es el típico manual para hacer un «detox» de las redes sociales o para abandonarlas por completo. De hecho ni lo intenta, y recalca cómo los retiros de desintoxicación digital ya se venden como una especie de truco para aumentar nuestra productividad al regreso. Hasta al término «autocuidado» le da una vuelta de tuerca poniendo énfasis en el peligro que corre en convertirse en algo con fines comerciales. more
I do not understand how this book is so highly rated. The authors argument is impossible to follow. The book all over the place using historical references with long excerpts of quoted text. I gave up. . more
I found an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book at the library where I work, so I was able to read this before the public gets to it this April. None of the other librarians had taken it, and I usually don't end up reading ARCs, but after looking at the cover a couple times, I found myself genuinely intrigued. As I finished the first chapter, I knew that I was going to read the entire thing. I am personally in a state of constant love and hate as well as inspiration and anxiety in terms of my relationship to social media (particularly Instagram), and this book spoke volumes to me about a term that is curiously not found anywhere within these pages: mindfulness. Odell probably omitted that word intentionally, as her goal in her personal and business life does not want to seduce readers into "hot" and "trending" terminology, as we know mindfulness has become over the past few years. more
Anyone who has run a public event where you show people other organisms has fielded the horrible, soul-crushing question, "But what does it do. " or worse, "What's it good for. " They're not unreasonable questions, perfectly understandable, human questions really, and at the same time completely maddening to an ardent naturalist, as if you'd just introduced your beloved mother to someone who then asked, "Nice to meet you, but what are you good for. " If I'm feeling forthright, I'll reply, "Nothing, really. What are you good for. more
There are more ideas in these essays than in dozens of books I've read in the last year or two. I'm generally not big on non-fiction, but every once in a while you get hold of a book about ideas which seems to complete the sentences which other books have started and yet didn't really tear into. The economy aspect of the attention economy--late stage capitalism and the 24/7 demands of the gig system, the rise and fall of unionization and collective action, the hairs-breadth tenuousness of economic security for this generation--plus the attention aspect of the attention economy, using such artists as Hockney and John Cage, to make another kind of argument. Some people have complained about the 'meandering' quality of the essays, but I can't help but wonder if that complaint is a feature of our bite-sized, time-is-money, tech addicted attention spans, to be impatient while a subtler, more complex argument is being laid out. I happen to like Montaigne as a philosopher, I like my cultural/social criticism in the form of a wide-flung net like Thank You For Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic and The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym, and I can see this book is going to go onto the shelf with those books. more
The title and cover had me intrigued. So many things take up our attention. Our phones. Social media. The show on the streaming service. more
3. 5 8 hours for work, 8 hours to rest and 8 hours to do as you will, was the rallying cry of the labor movement in the 1920s. Now, however with the advent of cell phones and internet, this no look over applies. We are always on, reachable and for many jobs, able to work anywhere. There is no longer a strict division between work and play. more
Wow I'm so glad this book is over. My main problem is that she's not a writer. She's an artist. She thinks that a long-winded narration of every park she's been in, every bird she's seen, and every time she didn't have her phone in her hand is worth describing. Her thesis- if I'm being generous- is that people should connect with nature and people (outside of social media). more
Taste: strawberry-flavored hard candyI confess that one of the reasons for picking up this book was the cover art *lol* And I confess that I didn't know what this nothing meant - perhaps for laziness. Four-day work week. But I'm just joking here. The main point is this: stop giving so easily attention to what the media chaos-god is asking from you (and it asks for all), for there is a big source for anxiety, fear, and despair, if things get out of control. Instead take time back: go to places of nature - inside-gardens, parks, bigger parks outside town. more
While our lives stew in the panic brought about by the Coronavirus pandemic, I find it incredibly frustrating that people are more concerned about their loss of productivity than the idea of possible death. Especially in a country like India, where the sheer population makes everything competitive, productivity is a term connoting quantity rather than quality. In the midst of this literal scramble to market everything, including one's self, for money, all I want to do is nothing. Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy articulates exactly how I have been feeling, and irrigates my ideas with some brilliant examples from art, nature, and science. This is not a self-help book. more
I started out a bit frustrated with this - it felt a bit academic, a bit too keen to wear its intelligence on its sleeve (I think I just get annoyed when people refer to Greek philosophers too much). But once I settled into Odell's style, I really warmed to it - this is so much more than a self-help guide to ditching twitter, it's an argument about modern life more broadly and the value of paying sustained attention to things (both the inherent value and the value in terms of achieving any meaningful political progress). Odell draws together discussion of art, ecology, sociology and science in thoughtful and surprising ways and her emphasis on the joys of birdwatching obviously found a sympathetic reader in me. Lots to chew over here - would love to hear what others' thought. more
Like others, this book is not what I was expecting. I was expecting more of a how-to, self-help book but instead this is a very heady, very academic and well-researched treatise on attention, culture, and our society at large. I didn’t get to finish because of a slew of family events, but what I read I did. respect. I never was excited to pick the book back up, but once I did I always found the author’s arguments original and well-founded - I found myself wanting to highlight a LOT. more
This was my first one star review. I am in awe that such a directionless, condescending, out of touch book was published. The author’s big idea is that we should all reject capitalist, productivity-driven ideals and take up a life of smelling our own farts and bird-watching (or as the author calls it, “bird-noticing”. ) Her most unique (and nauseating) thesis is asserting the value of bioregionalism, which when touted by a Bay Area resident, rings as privileged and out of touch as the politicians she reviles. And although the content was soporific, the writing style was even worse. more
I am not clever enough to appreciate this book. Odell would occasionally write something spot-on and worthwhile but mainly I found the book long-winded and pretentious. The gist of the book is this - people need to step back and pause and think about how they are communicating online. They need to learn to pull back & experience solitude and silence so they can deeply ponder what they think instead of automatically responding to what tech designers want them to respond to. "To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. more
HOW TO DO NOTHING by Jenny Odell is a surprising book. It is only in small part about what I thought, given the title. Odell covers a great number of subjects in her pursuit of discussion about her purported topic of leisure. Or perhaps leisure isn't actually the topic. Yes, that's it. more
I loved this activist, anti-capitalist book wrapped in a disarming, self-help floral cover. It's consolidating a lot of what I've been reading lately that's been a reaction to our always online hustle culture. Time is money and it's gone well beyond #girlbossing, the grind, and side hustles — expanding the boundaries of our work life. It's the fact that for many of us, every waking moment sees us building our personal brands, submitting our leisure time for numerical evaluation via likes, comments and views. We're constantly checking in on our performance and monitoring the value of our personal brand. more