How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

It seems like some of the negative reviews have an agenda to push, especially the one that only quotes from the first and last paragraphs of the book. I would guess that person did not even read the book. I enjoyed the thoughts from the author. It made me think of things differently. I appreciated the argument about valuing things that aren’t valued in money or measured in the economy. It argues that we need time to process our thoughts and not just thoughtlessly react to social media posts. It argues we need the ability to direct our conversations differently to different audiences rather than the one size fits all post of Facebook. It argues to get to know your neighborhood and local place. If you are sick of the continued outrage machines we have created in our national discussions, you may wish to read this. It is true the author is viewing life from inside a San Francisco cultural bubble but I still found resonance with main points while living in the Midwest U.S.

Not a self-help guide, but rather a fascinating collection of essays that critique the modern “attention economy,” where our time and attention is deemed useless if not spent in the pursuit of profit and “progress.” Odell deftly weaves historical, literary, and artistic references together (from Diogenes to Herman Melville to Tehching Hsieh) and covers a whole lot of ground in a book that in a lesser author’s hand could seem inconsistent. Instead, it’s like having a meandering conversation with a brilliant friend.If you’re looking for a digital detox guide, go elsewhere (though she does spend time dismantling the very concept). If a capitalist critique (by a woman in academia, no less) gets your knickers in a twist, avoid. If you want some genuine inspiration as to how to exist, resist, and survive in the world as it is today, you won’t be disappointed.

Zen master Dogen - perhaps "doing nothing's" greatest champion - once said that to study Zen is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to become one with the ten thousand thing." Ms. Odell seems incapable of the second directive. So much of "doing nothing", of real retreat, is characterized not by a separation of ourselves from the red dust of the world but rather from our own mental patterning. While Ms' Odell's book has some very interesting and helpful passages on physical removal, the vast majority of its pages suffers from interminable leftist screeds and neo-Marxist platitudes that Odell seems incapable or unwilling to put down. She is able to drop her phone, but not the ideas that keep her equally enthralled. Doing nothing, for Odell, seems little more than a way to rally the one's mental energies so as to mount a quixotic challenge against the patriarchy and all of the oppressive "isms" that are keeping us from our post capitalistic utopia.For those truly interesting in learning how to do nothing, learn to pray, find a meditation teacher, or take a walk in the woods. Either will leave you recharged, open to new ideas, and feeling timeless and free. Sadly, Ms. Odell's book will leave you more tightly bound to the tyranny of our divisive age. The real practice of doing nothing is that of forgetting. It gives us the space to remember who we were before we knew.

Excellent and thoughtful book, probably the best I’ve read on the topic of the attention economy precisely because Odell resists facile prescriptions and instead critiques the roots of the problems we are currently facing and which social media is exacerbating. In brief, these are alienation from our surroundings, alienation from our selves, and alienation from one another, brought about by capitalism and neoliberalism generally. But in detail she discusses and thinks about much more in these pages, and it stays close to lived experience. As well as demonstrating various ways of resisting without opting out. The fact that all this is lost on Sam the Eagle up there in his supposedly scathing review, I think, is another sign of its quality. Reading this book kept reminding me of no author more than Rebecca Solnit. I read it over a couple days and I’ll be reading it again, I think.

Read this book and I dare you not to want Jenny Odell to become your new BFF.How to Do Nothing is an amazing exploration of our current attention-competing, dizzying world of information overload—and it would be a fabulous book if it just stopped there. But Odell actually offers insights into how to fight this modern cacophony of too-muchedness, leaving us with an improbably optimistic and refreshing view on a decidedly 21st-century problem.I'm anxiously awaiting my nieces' and nephews' transitions into adulthood, so I an share this work with them. Because it's just that necessary.

How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell feels like the right book at the right time for me. I spend enough time online to worry about what it’s doing to my sense of self. “My experience,” as Odell writes, “is what I agree to attend to". So, when I scroll through my news and social media feeds, I not only get a nonsensical view of the world, but I further alienate myself from myself. Maybe this is why I feel so alone and depressed after spending too much time online. “Expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.” Odell’s solution isn’t to call for a digital detox, but rather to shift and deepen our attention to where it matters most: our actual (rather than online) communities. By paying deeper attention to the context of the people and places of our world, we can move from connectivity (something Facebook holds sacrosanct) to sensitivity, which “involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous.”

Disappointed I thought this book will help me learn how to do nothing it is a philosophical book trying to explain why doing nothing is good for you Most people already know that I know that I do not know how to do it Do not waste your time and money if you want to learn how to do nothing this book do not teach that

If you are starting to feel heavy under the weight of current politics, the rapid churn of social media, mental health, trolling, fake news and just the general sense that everything is somehow getting more intense, read this book.It's not about how to shut yourself off from society and live as a hermit. It's not a bunch of shallow hand-wringing about social media and "kids these days." It's not even a detox or retreat guide. How To Do Nothing is a careful, well-researched look at how we choose to engage with our world and with each other, so that we can find ways to restore nuance, context and a sense of belonging. To do this, Odell investigates everything from history and politics to literature, art, sociology, even bird watching.Though this book is written in a slightly academic style and the reader may benefit from some knowledge of critical methods or modern philosophy, it's so honest that I believe it would resonate strongly with anyone. I have personally taken a lot from this book and have been thinking about it for weeks since I read it.

Full of stimulating ideas. I’ve passed it on to a friend who’s an executive coach.I think one can relate more to the book (and some of the examples) if one is familiar with California.The work was a little contradictory at times about our relationship with our ‘app-driven devices’. And, I found a mention of the author ‘killing time’ simply bizarre given the underlying emphasis on what might be seen as ‘mindfulness’.Perhaps this was just a figure of speech? That said, I did find the author’s prose style rather clumsy at times. Is this because she writes in American English and I’m a British English writer? Or it might be generational?I’ve got a background in computing going back to the late 1960s, and was involved with AI work in the mid 1980s. Even then, some of the problematic aspects of technology were evident - if only in embryo.Jenny Odell offers lots of suggestions for resisting but I see little evidence that her impassioned pleas will have much impact on most of those trapped in the ‘Attention Economy’. If one does want to resist (perhaps even ‘drop out’ to some degree) opportunities to do so seem very dependant on how much personal autonomy one enjoys. This is, to be fair, something she recognises.The one, overwhelming depressing aspect of the book is the assertion that there’s ‘hundreds of designers and engineers predict(ing) and plan(planing) for our every move on these platforms’. In other words, getting us to ‘click’ for reasons that are essentially about generating income for these corporations.In a world facing a myriad of problems from climate change to a global refugee crisis, it’s more than a pity that these talented people can’t find something more constructive to do with their time and energy.

What has Facebook, Twitter, and even WhatsApp, done to us? This book is a reminder that the view under the sea might be fantastic, but we need to come up for air; not just from time to time, but often. Doing nothing, as Odell tells us, is not just ‘doing nothing’. Michael Caine, in one of his own books, recalls a story in which he commented to the director that his role merely required him to ‘just stand there and do nothing’. “You’re not doing not nothing’ the director said, ‘You’re watching, and listening’. That is the crux of Odell’s book. We should look up, look up, and look around from our daily routine engrossed at work and around our computers and cellphones. It is a book that nudges us to appreciate the diversity around us that we ignore because we are always in a hurry, and locked in by our routines, too pre-occupied with an ultimate objective – getting that promotion, securing a deal, inventing the product we dreamt about, and so on. Odell tells us plenty of nice stories of how life can be enjoyed, and in the process, learn not just to appreciate nature, but how we can do our part to preserve it. We learn the joy of actually noticing not just the birds in our garden or neighbourhood, but the different songs they make, and their habits. Odell has a way of spinning such stories that not only inspires ‘aha’ moments, but actually, creates lots of warm feelings about our surroundings and ourselves.The CD version is well produced and read by Rebecca Gibel over 8 hours. Very clear production, and Gibel has a warm and soothing way of reading.

I didn't really know what to expect with this book but it emphasises the value of our attention and suggests that we turn it to the natural world and face to face encounters if we want to escape the dopamine of our devices. Great food for thought here.

Some parts were interesting and informative, however, on the whole this book was a disorganized ramble. Disappointing.