What Makes A Millenial?: Reading Odell and Malcolm Harris

https://kdonaghy-54825.medium.com/what-makes-a-millenial-reading-odell-and-malcolm-harris-b345fa219de2

While I was reading “How to Do Nothing”, I came across a quote that really interested me. It was from the author Malcolm Harris and it read, “If were built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers-and we are-then were hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses.” When we had to pick a book to write another essay on, I wanted to get to learn more about the book that quote came from.

Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials is about how the world has labeled millennials as laziest, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. Malcolm Harris examines the upbringing of this generation and the trends while they were growing up such as runaway student debt, the rise of the intern, mass incarceration, social media, and more. He talks about what it means to be young in America and how millennials were the first generation raised explicitly as investments. Kids These Days he dares us to confront and take charge of the consequences now that we are grown up. In this essay I will compare these two books and discussing if Malcolm Harris and Jenny Odell were in the same room, what would they agree and or disagree on.

Writing 11: The Social Media Pandemic

Our country has been in turmoil for the past couple months. While some days are better and some are worse, everyday we are still plagued with the issue of race that has haunted our country for centuries. Starting in May, this issue took a whole new turn with the Black Lives Matter movement. This movement became huge in America after the death of George Floyd. George Floyd George Floyd was killed during an arrest after a store clerk alleged he had passed a counterfeit $20 bill in Minneapolis. A white police officer named Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for a period reported to be 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This sparked protests nationwide and a war for justice for all African Americas that have died due to police brutality.

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing discusses many ideas but the idea that stuck out to me most was her call to political activism. She discusses political activism through social media and discusses the pitfalls and advantages of social media. While reading this, my brain automatically related this to the Black Lives Matter movement. In my essay, I relate Jenny Odell’s ideas on political activism to the Black Lives Matter movement. I discuss the ways the movement followed Jenny Odell and how Jenny Odell would recommend the movement went.

https://kdonaghy-54825.medium.com/the-social-media-pandemic-31180fa0260b

Social Media: A Lifeline or a Battleground?

When I sat down and read The Impossibility of Retreat, I was shocked, but in the best way possible. In my first post, I dug into social media and the toxicity of technology and wondered what Odell would tell us to do about it just to flip the page and see the chapter with all my answers. I read it intensely because the topic of social media is something I am very interested and passionate about. Odell started by talking about an experience of her going without a phone for a few days and how she felt about it. As the chapter went on, she went from talking about detoxing from your phone, to detoxing from society as a whole. She talked about communes in the late 1960’s and hermits escaping from society and making new lives for themselves. At the end of all this, she finally gave me my answer about social media and society. 

The title of the chapter encompasses what she talked about. The impossibility of retreating. The first example she gave was about our phones. First, she talked about her own experience and how amazing it was to be without a phone. Odell stated, “I was fascinated with how inert my phone appeared as an object; it was no longer a portal to a thousand other places, a machine charged with dread and potentiality, or even a communication device. It was just a black metal rectangle, lying there as silently and matter-of-factly as a sweater or a book.” She then began to discuss Levi Felix, a man who made a camp for adults to escape technology. They would lock their phones in bags entitled “biohazard” and live freely without technology. Odell concluded that while living without technology may be an amazing experience, it is not realistic. 

I have had an experience like Odell’s and like Felix’s camp. Every summer, I go to a sleep away camp where in the beginning of the trip, our phones are collected and locked away in a box. Everyone moans and groans when they have to put their phone away because going a week with a phone is a teenagers worst nightmare. To me, this is probably the best part of the trip. Without a phone, a weight is lifted off your shoulders and the experience is completely different. Instead of sitting around on our phones, I would sit with my friends on the porch and we would tell stories from our lives. Some of them we would be clutching our stomachs in laughter and some we would be crying and hugging each other. We would sit around playing card games that lasted hours because that is all we had to do. There is no bond like that anymore. You can’t find that in the real world because of the roles phones play in our life.

The answer isn’t to throw your whole phone away (thank goodness), but to build a better relationship with it. She used Felix as an example again and quoted him saying, “The answer is not a weekend retreat to become a better employee, but rather a total and permanent reevaluation of one’s priorities. In other words, digital distraction is bane not because it made people less productive but because it took them away from the one life they had to live.” This point is the one I am arguing for. I find it so fundamentally important. We can not change the society we live in. We live in a world dependent on technology and that is not going to change. What we can change is how we interact with the world, through our technology. 

This is particularly important in our current political climate. Social media plays a huge role in what is going on in our country at the moment, both negatively and positively. On page 60, Odell says, “It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.” I actually highlighted this quote in my book because of how true it was. While spreading awareness on social media can help on some level, it can also start these firecrackers because not everyone shares the same opinions. The answer is to create a different relationship with social media and technology. It should not be our lifeline nor should it be our battleground. Finding a healthy balance with technology is the key.

Discovering the Attention Economy

When I opened this book and read what Odell was saying I had to pause and first figure out, what is the attention economy? After some research on the internet I found that the attention economy is something that I am so used to, I didn’t even realize it was there. When I see an ad on Instagram for something based on a picture I just liked, that is the attention economy. The ad that plays before every Youtube video is the attention economy. The internet is monopolized by three companies: Google, Apple, and Facebook. But Google, Apple and Facebook don’t care about you as a person; they care about their revenue. This means they care about holding your attention. Their ultimate aim is to keep you scrolling and searching, using their products over competitors. Odell’s project is “a guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy.”

Odell believes very strongly in the immoral monopoly that is social media. She also is very anti-capitalism. She believes that these two things are draining the life out of us. She uses a quote from Seneca that reads, “Look back in memory and consider… how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurement of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!” She connected this to not only spending your day on facebook, but also connected it to our society and how in a time where intelligent conversations are key, we find ourselves unable to achieve those crucial in-person conversations. 

Odell’s purpose is to fight this way of life. How does she want us to fight? By doing nothing. Now doing nothing is not like it seems. She describes her “nothing” as a plan of action. In the introduction she says, “ The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.” To me, she is trying to get her readers to look at life through a different lens. We are so comfortable with the life we live we never stop to question it. We let social media control our lives for what reason? To conform to society. Odell believes that the world we live in now due to the culture of Trump is “impatient with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious” and social media is a big contributor to that. Individuality is frowned upon. The more you are like everyone else, the more people like you. The more people like you, the more followers you have on social media.  

Odell uses personal stories to try to get us to understand where she is coming from. She tells us personal stories and then connects them to her beliefs. She tells us a detailed story about a tree called “Old Survivor” that she connects to resistance and being rooted to your true self, which are both linked to her doing nothing philosophy. 

Throughout the first chapter she also talks about a rose garden. The part about the rose garden that really impacted me was when she was in the middle of this beautiful space, surrounded by every color, sight, and smell. In this moment she said, “I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics can not compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light, and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable, detail of the real.” Growing up in the age of technology, this hit very deep. This makes me think of the concerts I’ve been to where every single person has their phone up instead of living in the moment. The time spent with friends and family, not enjoying eachothers company, but sitting on our phones. Everyone can relate to this which is what makes it so powerful. This connects to her belief in the evil in technology and makes you think of instances that technology has plagued your life. 

Odell’s project is to break us out of the society we are so used to. She wants us to realize we are trapped in this attention economy. She wants us to realize the negative effects social media and capitalism have on our lives. She wants us to start doing something about this, by doing nothing. On page 22, she describes doing nothing as almost a “deprogramming device”. While she gave us some overall themes of what “doing nothing” will entail, we will have to keep reading to really understand how she expects us to make this change. It could be things as little as to not look at the ads on our phones, to delete social media, or even as drastic as throwing our whole phone away to stay away from the toxicity of the attention economy and social media. While I’m hesitant to make that change, I am oddly excited to see what she has to say because the points she brings up really have me thinking.