We are and we do what we pay attention to. Like Simon before her, she contends that attention is the “ bottleneck of human thought.” It determines what we perceive in our environments. In our networked age of infobesity, the scarcity and low quality of our attention is ruining our health, relationships, communities and the planet, argues Odell.
Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. In an article entitled Designing Organizations for an information-rich world, he and his co-authors wrote prophetically that “ in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else. The phrase attention economy was coined by economist and psychologist Herbert A Simon in the 1970s. Her message feels even more relevant and necessary after years of Covid-related attention-destroying transformations. In a beautiful book published right before the start of the pandemic, artist and Stanford professor Jenny Odell questions “what we perceive as productive.” How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) makes the case for redirecting our attention as an act of resistance and a way to live a more meaningful life. What if the main problem was the fact that the attention economy has swallowed us whole? What if the solution was to start resisting it? Their satisfaction levels closely follow the downward curve of their mental health. Employees are resigning in droves in search of better opportunities. In 2022 burnout rates among workers are at unprecedented levels. Publisher: Melville House Publishing ISBN: 9781612198552 Number of pages: 256 Weight: 266 g Dimensions: 209 x 140 mm You may also be interested in.To say that workers are more exhausted than ever from spending their lives in front of screens would be an understatement. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent. 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.įar from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Odell sees our attention as the most precious-and overdrawn-resource we have.
So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity. Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing.
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