Inanimate Connection: Reading David Abram

https://mattcm-72213.medium.com/inanimate-connection-reading-david-abram-7588c52baffc

In my essay I decided to write about an idea that David Abram talks about in his book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. While reading How to Do Nothing I noticed that Odell touches on this idea briefly while mentioning Abram’s book and I thought it would be an interesting topic. Abram talks about how everything is connected in the world no matter if people consider something to be animate or inanimate. This connection that we feel to the world around us is why we sometimes feel the need to disconnect from our daily lives and try to reconnect with the natural world. As I got further into Becoming Animal I felt that I was better able to understand some aspects of what Jenny Odell was talking about because of this general idea.

Abram tells the reader to take a close look at their hands, to feel each of their fingers with their other fingers and really focus on how it feels. “This hand that touches things, then, is entirely part of the tactile field that it explores. It is one of the textured inhabitants of that field, like the velvet moss, the splintered surface of a telephone pole, or the scabrous bark of a white oak near your home.” He then challenges the reader to go to a tree and take hold of one of its leaves and focus on how it feels. He argues that when you feel the tree, the tree is feeling you back. When you look at something with your eyes, that thing you are looking at is looking back at you.

Writing 11: The Impact of Reconnecting

In my writing I discus how I apply Odell’s idea of disconnecting from our connected world and reconnecting to something else into my own life. I believe that this idea of reconnecting after disconnecting from something is really good for your mental and physical health. It encourages you to take a look at the world that is around you which we do not get to see too often due to how connected we are through our phones and forget about things that are bothering you.

“The more I think about it the more I realize that reconnecting with something is the most important part. Without this crucial step of reconnecting with something else, disconnecting from your phone, the internet, or anything that is bothering you in general is pointless. You will never truly be able to disconnect from something without reconnecting to something else.”

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Using the Attention Economy

Jenny Odell has been telling us through her book that she is all for the idea of “doing nothing” and against the idea of the attention economy and what it stands for. When Odell tells us to do nothing she means to do nothing to help or forward the goals of companies who make a profit off of people’s attention. However, she herself is guilty of profiting off of people’s attention. She needs to in order to make a living as an artist and writer, so what makes her different from the attention economy she is trying so hard to resist? Is it because she is not a big company? Or is it because she simply has not thought of the possibility that she has become what she has been trying so hard to resist. I highly doubt that a writer such as Odell would be oblivious to the fact that she uses similar techniques to that of the attention economy, so why does she do this on purpose?

Some of the most successful businesses in the world are successful mostly because of how they use the attention economy. No matter what the business is or how it was started it relies on the attention of other people in order to grow and thrive. If a business is created and they have the most amazing product in the world, but the business has no attention from consumers, then said business will not make a profit. On the other hand, if there is a business that has a mediocre product, but they know how to grab people’s attention and place ads and billboards in strategic spots, then they will end up with a much greater profit. This is just how the world works and will continue to work until people come up with a better, more efficient way of making money. 

The attention economy honestly is not all that bad. Although I find it creepy sometimes when I just get out of a conversation with someone about any type of topic and not five minutes later I see an ad for a related product on my phone, but overall it is very useful. I am one of those people who are not sure if they need or want anything until they see it, so for me the attention economy helps to bring my attention to things that I subconsciously like, want, or need. I disagree with Odell when she says that the attention economy steals people’s attention away from “non-productive” things and brings their attention to things that are deemed more “useful” by the attention economy. I think the attention economy has the ability to refocus someone’s attention towards something that could benefit them in the long run, but I do not think that it steals their attention away and makes them unable to focus on what they want.

I truly believe that the attention economy can be used as a tool of productivity no matter what you are trying to accomplish. I know that Odell wants us to disconnect from the reality of our world and realise that we do not need the attention economy to thrive and I agree with her on that, but to say that you should resist it all together in order to be productive is a bit extreme. The attention economy is a tool, a tool that works to show you things that you are interested in. Yes it tries to get you to buy these products, but it is your choice whether you buy the products or not. If your goal is to start a business, the attention economy can help you by either showing you similar things that have been done by other people, or by giving your business an audience so it has the ability to grow. If you are looking for inspiration on something, the attention economy can bring your attention to something that could help you out and possibly give you an idea.

I know that I am talking about the attention economy as if it is some kind of app that you can control on your phone, but the way I see it, it can be. Just because it was made for the sole purpose of capitalizing on people’s attention, does not mean that you can not profit from it just as much as big companies do. Odell makes it seem like the average person is the victim of the attention economy, when in fact they have the ability to profit from it, just like she does.

Disconnecting from the Attention Economy

Jenny Odell’s main idea in her book, “How to Do Nothing” is to remind us that we do not need the attention economy in order to be productive or successful like social media or ads would have us believe. Before reading this book I was not sure exactly what the attention economy was, but after looking it up and realizing that my attention was an actual commodity that was being manipulated and sold/bought by other people, I began to understand Odell’s project a bit better. 

I believe that her overall project is that she wants people to think and act on their own without being controlled by the attention economy. She really wants us to realize that doing nothing can be, in fact, doing more than when we are doing something that the attention economy deems useful or necessary. Odell even tells us in the book that she feels it is, “an activist book disguised as a self help book.” This further makes me believe that her aim, or her project in, “How to Do Nothing” is to rally people together and “do nothing” to, “help people find ways of connecting that are substantive, sustaining, and absolutely unprofitable to corporations”. 

Jenny Odell does a careful job informing us on how she feels about the attention economy without acting too much like the said attention economy herself. She simply tries to bring your attention back to where it would have been if there was no attention economy around. Odell wants us to, “disengage from the attention economy” and to, “re engage with something else.”

Social media plays a big part in the attention economy without people realizing it. According to platforms such as snapchat and instagram, we cannot be as successful as we want unless we are doing exactly what the influencers on those platforms are doing. Everyday when I look on instagram and snapchat I see many stories about how people became successful and are living their life in luxury because of something they did. 

Companies take advantage of the fact that everyone wants to live an extravagant life where money is no issue and they steal your attention away to focus you on something “useful”.  Odell’s project tries to make us realize that you don’t need to do what is deemed “useful” in order to actually be useful. She has an amazing example of this in her book when she talks about the useless tree story. The part of the story I am referring to is this, “The tree points out to him that fruit trees and timber trees are regularly ravaged. Meanwhile, uselessness has been this tree’s strategy: ‘This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I have ever grown this large?’” Breaking away from the attention economy may seem similar to doing nothing or being “useless” to the people running it, but in fact this doing nothing is where creative, new, useful ideas come from.

By disconnecting from our connected world, we allow ourselves to think on our own instead of the attention economy directing our attention somewhere it thinks is “useful” or essential to life. Just because we are not thinking how everyone else wants us to think, does not mean we are doing something wrong. It just means that we are able to tear ourselves away from the addictive attention economy that now drives our country’s economics and possibly be creative in a way that could change the world for the better. 

I can tell that Jenny Odell is against organizations who profit off of people’s attention not only because she has explicitly stated so in the book, but also because she herself seems to be a naturally creative person. The perspective she has as an artist as well as a writer really explains her stand on the attention economy. Her entire livelihood is based off of the ideas that come into her head and the creative input that she gathers from the texts of others. According to Odell, the attention economy stunts the creativity of others and does not allow people to get in touch with who they truly are. Instead of the attention economy making people believe that the thoughts and ideas they have are useful, it gives them a false standard to look at and makes them believe that in order to be as successful as others they have to abandon their “useless” ideas and in turn adopt the useful ideas that are being presented to them.