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danilanglie 's review for:
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
by Jenny Odell
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.