How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

I started paying more attention to the berries that cedar waxwings love (and sometimes get drunk on!) and even came to appreciate bugs, since the gnats I constantly swatted away on the local trails now looked to me like bird food.

the impossibility of paying attention to the discrete category “birds” became apparent.

helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally.

the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.

the waves of hating, shaming, and vindictive public opinion that roll unchecked through platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

dig through someone’s old tweets and re-present the ones that look the most offensive out of context.

“context collapse.”

was. To tweet was to throw a message into a void that could include close friends, family, potential employers, and (as recent events have shown us) sworn enemies. Marwick and boyd describe how context collapse creates a “lowest-common-denominator philosophy of sharing [that] limits users to topics that are safe for all possible readers.”4

a race to the mediocre bottom

surprise homecoming party is an example of the useful architectural metaphor that Meyrowitz employs in No Sense of Place: it’s as if all of the walls around different social environments have come down.

those rooms and walls were precisely what provided the spatial context for what was said in them, since they summoned a distinct audience out of the anonymous masses by only letting some people in.

“we would have trouble projecting a very different definition of ourselves to different people when so much other information about us was available to each of our audiences.”

this I would add the inability to publicly change our minds, i.e., to express different selves over time.

Would you want to be friends with someone who never changed their mind about anything?

apologizing and changing our minds online is so often framed as a weakness, we either hold our tongues or risk ridicule.

context collapse is something we can understand spatially.

Just as a series of rooms are dissolved into one big “situation,” instantaneity flattens past, present, and future into a constant, amnesiac present.

the immediacy of social media closes down the time needed for “political elaboration.”

“activists do not have the space and time to articulate their political reflections.”

communication was too fast, too quick, and too short.”

networks built on social media “are often based on a common reaction / emotion and not on a shared political project and neither on a shared understanding of social conflict.”

thought and deliberation require not just incubation space (solitude and/or a defined context) but incubation time.

As the attention economy profits from keeping us trapped in a fearful present, we risk blindness to historical context at the same time that our attention is ripped from the physical reality of our surroundings.

our platforms for “connection” and expression detract from the attention to place and time that we need, simultaneously eroding the contexts that would allow new strategies to sharpen and flourish?

online network that attends to the spatiotemporal character of our experience as humans—animals

The choice—not of what to say (“What’s on your mind?”) but whether and when to participate—doesn’t feel like it belongs to me when I use Facebook and Twitter.

why I assume social media needs to feel like a Wall Street trading floor.

how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding. This is its own form of “research,” and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy.

I want to see a restoration of context, a kind of context collection in the face of context collapse. 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.

“The only indispensable factor in the generation of power is the living together of people,” Arendt writes. “Only where men live so close together that the potentialities for action are always present can power remain with them.”20

difference generates power

the space of appearance is still so often a space of physical appearance.

While they pulled strings on Twitter and in the media, it was the house—and the group dynamic that it brought into being—that provided the space of appearance.

Most of all, this social network would rehabilitate the role of time and location in our everyday consciousness. It would offer the places where we are right now as the incubation spaces for the empathy, responsibility, and political innovation that can be useful not just here, but everywhere.

I grew up thinking that parks were somehow just “leftover” spaces, but I’ve learned that the story of any park or preserve is absolutely one of “redemption preserv[ing] itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.”

Parks don’t just give us the space to “do nothing” and inhabit different scales of attention. Their very existence, especially in the midst of a city or on the former sites of extraction, embodies resistance.

But I also realized for the first time that my wish to preserve this place was also a self-preservation instinct, insofar as I needed spaces like this too, and insofar as I couldn’t feel truly at home in a solely human community.

I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing that I couldn’t turn away. That’s the other thing that happens when you fall in love. Friends complain that you’re not present or that you have your head in the clouds; companies dealing in the attention economy might say the same thing about me, with my head lost in the trees, the birds, even the weeds growing in the sidewalk.

Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention.