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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
If you read this take notes, I didn't and wish I did because I don't want to reread it but I probably will sometime. Overall there wasn't anything huge or unexpected about this book, but I don't think that was the point. Odell suggests a different approach towards living in general, challenging us to recognize how technology steals us away from the ecological and social contexts that create meaningful lives.You could probably internalize that without reading this, but there are some concepts and examples and the book that help make that feel more concrete, including terms like "manifest destruction" and "i-thou" vs "i-it" mentalities which I won't try to explain but you can read about lol.
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
This is kind of a random note but why was this book named this? It should have been called How to Pay Attention. A much better title to describe what this book is actually talking about. It feels like the title is just there to grab your attention but doesn't really describe the central thesis at all.
I'm giving this three stars because... well, look. It didn't piss me off too terribly or do anything so egregious that I hated it all-out or anything, but it also really did not connect with me. The parts that felt relevant and relatable to my life were kind of just obvious shit like, social media is bad and addictive, we need to form local communities... like, yeah. I agree. And then a lot of this stuff just wasn't really relevant specifically to me, but also felt very narrow in scope overall.
So for example, there's this part early on where she's talking about how now that everyone gets emails on their phone, it means that every environment becomes a work environment. She was talking about the fact that everyone can get in touch with everyone and interpose work into off the clock time. Totally agree, that's totally true for me. I have an office job.
You know who it's not true for? My father, who works a skilled labor job. My sister, who works in disability care as an in-house care provider and only very rarely and briefly uses a computer for work. My friends who work in warehouses and various retail jobs and at Starbucks. None of them have THIS unique issue with regards to work interposing on their off-the-clock time. The issues of the attention economy and its relationship to capitalism are absolutely relevant to their lives, but not because they can get emails on their phones now. That has nothing to do with how a HUGE chunk of the working population of America operates. I know it sounds like I'm quibbling here, but she made so many supposedly universal statements that were actually only true about a person with an assumed level of education and higher paying job and it really threw me for a loop.
I also found the style of this book to be kind of alienating, like, it was written in this sort of pseudo-academic way, when it's clearly meant for a general audience. So the ideas would be kind of simplistic and self-explanatory, and then the language itself would be more intellectual. I have some really smart and curious people in my life who are totally addicted to their phones, and feeling socially isolated and going through despair right now because of the state of the world. The kinds of people who this book should be for, right? But some of those people would have a really hard time understanding this book because it's written above their reading level because they did not have economic access to college and after high school began blue collar jobs and did not continue to train their minds to a certain level of literacy. I'm being so careful about how I talk about this, because I'm not saying this book is "too smart" for some people, and I'm not even saying that any author should intentionally use smaller vocabulary words to make a book more accessible. I don't believe either of those things. I just think, this is supposed to be about a universal suffering that we are experiencing as humans in this cultural moment, and it felt like it was written only for well-educated and well-off liberal Americans. Which kind of rubbed me the wrong way, honestly!
So yeah. I'm not saying this book is totally useless or there's nothing to get out of it, but it came across as pretty smug and unhelpful, and somehow managed to be pretty shallow in its ideas, while weirdly convoluted in how those ideas were discussed at times.
I'm giving this three stars because... well, look. It didn't piss me off too terribly or do anything so egregious that I hated it all-out or anything, but it also really did not connect with me. The parts that felt relevant and relatable to my life were kind of just obvious shit like, social media is bad and addictive, we need to form local communities... like, yeah. I agree. And then a lot of this stuff just wasn't really relevant specifically to me, but also felt very narrow in scope overall.
So for example, there's this part early on where she's talking about how now that everyone gets emails on their phone, it means that every environment becomes a work environment. She was talking about the fact that everyone can get in touch with everyone and interpose work into off the clock time. Totally agree, that's totally true for me. I have an office job.
You know who it's not true for? My father, who works a skilled labor job. My sister, who works in disability care as an in-house care provider and only very rarely and briefly uses a computer for work. My friends who work in warehouses and various retail jobs and at Starbucks. None of them have THIS unique issue with regards to work interposing on their off-the-clock time. The issues of the attention economy and its relationship to capitalism are absolutely relevant to their lives, but not because they can get emails on their phones now. That has nothing to do with how a HUGE chunk of the working population of America operates. I know it sounds like I'm quibbling here, but she made so many supposedly universal statements that were actually only true about a person with an assumed level of education and higher paying job and it really threw me for a loop.
I also found the style of this book to be kind of alienating, like, it was written in this sort of pseudo-academic way, when it's clearly meant for a general audience. So the ideas would be kind of simplistic and self-explanatory, and then the language itself would be more intellectual. I have some really smart and curious people in my life who are totally addicted to their phones, and feeling socially isolated and going through despair right now because of the state of the world. The kinds of people who this book should be for, right? But some of those people would have a really hard time understanding this book because it's written above their reading level because they did not have economic access to college and after high school began blue collar jobs and did not continue to train their minds to a certain level of literacy. I'm being so careful about how I talk about this, because I'm not saying this book is "too smart" for some people, and I'm not even saying that any author should intentionally use smaller vocabulary words to make a book more accessible. I don't believe either of those things. I just think, this is supposed to be about a universal suffering that we are experiencing as humans in this cultural moment, and it felt like it was written only for well-educated and well-off liberal Americans. Which kind of rubbed me the wrong way, honestly!
So yeah. I'm not saying this book is totally useless or there's nothing to get out of it, but it came across as pretty smug and unhelpful, and somehow managed to be pretty shallow in its ideas, while weirdly convoluted in how those ideas were discussed at times.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
I've found it hard to relate to the author or the book.
She begins explaining that she started the book because her candidate lost an election. And she tells us how she can ’do nothing’ because she has a job that requires only two days of work per week.
The audible version is terrible and seems to be narrated by Alexa itself.
I liked the cover picture, though.
She begins explaining that she started the book because her candidate lost an election. And she tells us how she can ’do nothing’ because she has a job that requires only two days of work per week.
The audible version is terrible and seems to be narrated by Alexa itself.
I liked the cover picture, though.
This book reminded me a lot of "How to Change Your Mind," by Michael Pollan. Both books try to take us out of our routinized lives and challenge us to look at the world around us. For Pollan, psychotropic drugs seem to allow us to do so. For Odell, the method/theory for is a little more nebulous, but, in short, appears to be simply shifting our attentions. Her ideas are perhaps not as exciting, new, or challenging as Pollan's; but, Odell does a great job at describing the faults of our "attention economy," which collapses context and, in doing so, arguably removes meaningfulness from our lives. "Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that entails for any mortal being." (xix).
Odell divides her book into six chapters, through which she sets out her premise (Chapter 1), describes past efforts to create removed societies (Chapter 2), discusses subverting the normal dialectic choices in society, by simply refusing ("I'd prefer not to") to answer society's questions (Chapter 3), encourages us to pay closer to the world around us (Chapter 4) and to care about those in our geographic proximity (Chapter 5), and talks about the negative role, but potential promise, of technology in our attention economy (Chapter 6). Like a good essayist, Odell discusses the works and theories of others, in support of her arguments; and many of those works, by themselves, interested me. I found myself continually putting the book down, to google the people she discusses (esp. Pivli Takala, Tehching Hsieh, David Hockney's photography series); perhaps exemplifying the attention economy at work. Odell does an excellent job of putting her ideas in the context of the work and ideas of others--philosophers, performance artists, media critics--to both show that her premise isn't terribly unique and to engage the reader. It worked for me--I'm not sure I'll take much away from this book, apart from a (hopefully not short-lived) desire for mindfulness and curiosity about the context of the things around me.
Odell does a mostly good job at weaving her own life into the story. At times, her doing so seemed to ground the book too much in one place (namely California), which left me a little disinterested. But, for the most part, it imparted a relatable perspective to her ideas and discussion. And, it's when describing her own feelings and experiences that Odell is at her most eloquent. Describing her own challenges with the attention economy, she writes, "I am personally unsatisfied with untrained attention, which flickers from one new thing to the next, not only because it is a shallow experience, or because it is an expression of habit rather than will, but because it gives me less access to my own human experience." (119). Discussing her own connection to the ecological world around her: "I withered without this contact; a life without other life didn’t seem worth living. To acknowledge that this space and everything in it was engendered meant acknowledging that I, too, was endangered. The wildlife refuge was my refuge." (183).
I didn't agree with everything Odell wrote, but I appreciated and generally agreed with her perspective. Moreover, her writing is so self-aware, it's difficult to fault. She recognizes the privilege of being able to write about disengaging from the attention economy; and admits how self-helpy a book like this--in our media-oversaturated times--may seem ("At some point I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book. I'm not sure it's fully either." (xxii)). At the very least, this book established for me that she's someone whose perspective I'm interested in following in these times.
Odell divides her book into six chapters, through which she sets out her premise (Chapter 1), describes past efforts to create removed societies (Chapter 2), discusses subverting the normal dialectic choices in society, by simply refusing ("I'd prefer not to") to answer society's questions (Chapter 3), encourages us to pay closer to the world around us (Chapter 4) and to care about those in our geographic proximity (Chapter 5), and talks about the negative role, but potential promise, of technology in our attention economy (Chapter 6). Like a good essayist, Odell discusses the works and theories of others, in support of her arguments; and many of those works, by themselves, interested me. I found myself continually putting the book down, to google the people she discusses (esp. Pivli Takala, Tehching Hsieh, David Hockney's photography series); perhaps exemplifying the attention economy at work. Odell does an excellent job of putting her ideas in the context of the work and ideas of others--philosophers, performance artists, media critics--to both show that her premise isn't terribly unique and to engage the reader. It worked for me--I'm not sure I'll take much away from this book, apart from a (hopefully not short-lived) desire for mindfulness and curiosity about the context of the things around me.
Odell does a mostly good job at weaving her own life into the story. At times, her doing so seemed to ground the book too much in one place (namely California), which left me a little disinterested. But, for the most part, it imparted a relatable perspective to her ideas and discussion. And, it's when describing her own feelings and experiences that Odell is at her most eloquent. Describing her own challenges with the attention economy, she writes, "I am personally unsatisfied with untrained attention, which flickers from one new thing to the next, not only because it is a shallow experience, or because it is an expression of habit rather than will, but because it gives me less access to my own human experience." (119). Discussing her own connection to the ecological world around her: "I withered without this contact; a life without other life didn’t seem worth living. To acknowledge that this space and everything in it was engendered meant acknowledging that I, too, was endangered. The wildlife refuge was my refuge." (183).
I didn't agree with everything Odell wrote, but I appreciated and generally agreed with her perspective. Moreover, her writing is so self-aware, it's difficult to fault. She recognizes the privilege of being able to write about disengaging from the attention economy; and admits how self-helpy a book like this--in our media-oversaturated times--may seem ("At some point I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book. I'm not sure it's fully either." (xxii)). At the very least, this book established for me that she's someone whose perspective I'm interested in following in these times.
Im listening to digital minimalism at the same time and just like that one wayyyy more. This kinda comes off as…whiny(???) at times. Its only ~8hrs and i thought i could plow through but mehhh for what