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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https://medium.com/@mattcm_72213

Disconnecting from Media

Lauren Cooper

The title of Jenny Odell’s book, “How to do Nothing,” insinuates she is teaching the reader how to be lazy.  This book is truly a guide to switch the reader’s attention to think deeper, “in such times as these, having recourse to periods of and spaces for ‘doing nothing’ is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves– individually or collectively” (Odell 22). When Odell talks about “doing nothing” she is referring to the constant state of connectedness through the ever-changing production. The phrase seems contradictory, but the act of doing nothing is directing our attention away from the constant information overload that people are so easily hooked on through phones, computers, iPads, Apple watches, and the list goes on. A person can be distracted within a matter of seconds due to the easy access to the media. Once a person can resist the attention economy, “it leads to awareness, not only of how lucky I am to be alive but to ongoing patterns of cultural and ecological devastation around me […] In other words, simple awareness is the seed of responsibility” (xxii). The book can be categorized as an “activist” and “self-help book” because Odell is trying to start a social change by teaching one person at a time through changing their style of life. People are trapped in a bubble, but once they are able to poke through it they could find much of what their looking for is already there. 

Odell is seemingly trying to have the reader stop and smell the roses and she even alludes to this when she talks about the Rose Garden. She always refers to the Rose Garden because it is a complete disconnection from the fast pace city she lives in. The idea of disconnection is sometimes referred to as “removal” which for some people it “fundamentally changed their attitude to the world they returned too […] the pause in time is often the only thing that can precipitate change on a certain scale” (Odell 9/10).  By removing yourself from the world you are used to, you could be able to understand the world as a whole, not just the small fraction that you see every day. You will get to see the world in a different light racially, environmentally, and economically. Odell continually brings up the Rose Garden because it embodies her project clearly. It was almost turned into condos which symbolizes how the rest of the world has been modernized. The local residents represent what Odell is trying to do. She is trying to show people that is is an option to push away technology and live in the present.  

Odell often refers to different artists. One art piece that she explains is one by Eleanor Coppola which was a map with marked locations of windows that are landmarks. Odell likes this because it is not the typical art that someone would see in a gallery it “recognizes art that exists where it already is” (Odell 6). One experience that she shared was bird-watching which seems like an act of doing nothing, but during this, she made connections to wild animals and learned a lot in the process. She not only picked up on different bird songs unintentionally, but she started to realize that while actually paying attention “something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things” (Odell 9). Every example she pulls from different books, pieces of art, and her own experiences reflect her desire to push people out of the technological world to the natural world. 

The world we live in it seems that the only goal is to make enhancements in technology and find success with money. Odell writes about the importance of stepping away from this because nothing can replace human contact and being in nature. 

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.