38 books
—
19 voters
Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.
Start by marking “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” as Want to Read:
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
by
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
...more
Get A Copy
Hardcover, 225 pages
Published
April 9th 2019
by Melville House
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Reader Q&A
Community Reviews
Showing 1-30

Start your review of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

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.
...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

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 th
...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 mea ...more
To give you an idea of one of the sentences: "If we think about what it mea ...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 ...more
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 ...more

Jun 04, 2020
Nenia ✨️ Socially Awkward Trash Panda ✨️ Campbell
rated it
did not like it
Shelves:
nonfiction

Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || Pinterest
While 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 ...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 o
...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 hav ...more
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 hav ...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 wh ...more
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 wh ...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 rel
...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

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,
...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 p
...more

Taste: strawberry-flavored hard candy
I 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 ...more
I 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 ...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. This book i
...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 ...more
Jenny Odell's ...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 meani
...more

*I was sent an e-arc from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.*
Let's start with the negatives and work our way to the positives to end on a high note, shall we?
The Bad:
♤ Bogged down with information dump at times.
♤ Not very cohesive at times/jumping around too much.
♤ Not as engaging as I thought it would be.
♤ Odd topic changes and reaches to try to make certain information fit that didn't feel right or necessary. Like, more should be edited out to make the points better and not over expl ...more
Let's start with the negatives and work our way to the positives to end on a high note, shall we?
The Bad:
♤ Bogged down with information dump at times.
♤ Not very cohesive at times/jumping around too much.
♤ Not as engaging as I thought it would be.
♤ Odd topic changes and reaches to try to make certain information fit that didn't feel right or necessary. Like, more should be edited out to make the points better and not over expl ...more

it exceeded my expectations. I thought it would be a lame self-help book. but it wasn't!
...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. Work. Etc. I thought this would be a great self-help book that would talk about how and why we should take the time to "do nothing." And since the author is in the middle of an area where a lot of this was born (or has strong connections to), I thought she might have more interesting insights.
This...wasn't that. This was a lot of "academic-speak" on a topic tha ...more
This...wasn't that. This was a lot of "academic-speak" on a topic tha ...more

This was a book I enjoyed "sipping" over the course of several months with a few pages read at a time. I was struck by the parallels between some of Odell's conclusions and the ascetic tradition, but seeing how she applied that to a digital age was fascinating. I was particularly struck by the chapter on refusal and what it means to have a margin for refusal. All in all, a reflective read with a lot of descriptive power
...more

"It's tempting to conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live. But I refuse to do that. That’s because the pitfalls of the attention economy can’t just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques; they also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race."
This is not at all a how-to, but a multidisciplinary work on engaging with the world outside of the corporate-controlled attention econ ...more
This is not at all a how-to, but a multidisciplinary work on engaging with the world outside of the corporate-controlled attention econ ...more

Jan 12, 2020
mindful.librarian ☀️
marked it as did-not-finish
Setting aside at page 50. Yet another book my brain isn’t quite advanced enough to fully engage with.

A very short review which doesn't do justice to this book: yes, I was taken by the self-helpy title. I was hoping that it would provide some guidelines based on extensive research into how we all get hooked on refreshing feeds full of people we don't know talking about things that we pretty much instantly forget about as soon as we close our browser (that's just me, maybe). Instead, I got birds. This is fine! I don't dislike birds, although I am not keen on the finding-self-in-nature essay/book.
...more

this book about doing nothing somehow manages to be about… everything??? Everything includes:
-pushing back against capitalist ideas of productivity and optimization and instead valuing observation and maintenance
-Busyness as a “symptom of deficient vitality” -we romanticize being overworked because we’ve internalized that producing work is the greatest value we can contribute
-the nonsense of the “personal brand” model of identity where we present ourselves as just a set of superficial, rigid, ...more
-pushing back against capitalist ideas of productivity and optimization and instead valuing observation and maintenance
-Busyness as a “symptom of deficient vitality” -we romanticize being overworked because we’ve internalized that producing work is the greatest value we can contribute
-the nonsense of the “personal brand” model of identity where we present ourselves as just a set of superficial, rigid, ...more
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Play Book Tag: How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell - 5 stars | 1 | 28 | Jan 26, 2020 08:34PM |
Articles featuring this book
Last year, Buzzfeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen struck a chord with her viral article “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.”...
112 likes · 17 comments
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”
—
45 likes
“What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return-and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.”
—
25 likes
More quotes…