Scan barcode
A review by rick2
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
2.0
Do less. The world is mean and full of distractions. Do less.
More or less the gist of what I took away from this book. I think it was written for someone with a very different set of experiences than mine. I grew up on the cusp of the mobile wave. The iPhone came out when I was in high school. It seems like the author comes from a very different background.
And I guess that’s some of my frustration with this book. The author wants to moralize about technology. But it seems to come from a place of navel gazing. First by sharing her own life. Fine, but not a compelling sample size. Anecdotal evidence feels really important, but it is not real evidence. It’s one instance. And second, she doesn’t seem to understand the technology. All of her examples are ripped from other books, podcasts, and TED talks I have also mostly read and found lacking. Or her conclusions are not what I would agree with. She waxes poetic about Diogenes the Cynic as an example of a life lived on its own terms. The dude lived on the streets most of the time. Totally get it if that’s your thing. But I like my house. I’m fine exchanging some of my time for work to be able to continue to live in my house.
There’s this current of negativity around our technological lives that is easy to adopt. And I don’t think it’s authentic. I don’t mean that it’s fake, I think it’s more of a displacement of the general malease we feel at being alive. We aren’t running from predators, we aren’t constantly occupied by the search for food, so our minds have too much time to come up with neuroticisms. I think that artists, the lightning rods of felt human experience, are also very subject to this phenomenon. This book seems like it was written directly from that feeling.
So I guess, if you feel *feelings* about technology, maybe this book will help you to understand them and not feel so alone.
More or less the gist of what I took away from this book. I think it was written for someone with a very different set of experiences than mine. I grew up on the cusp of the mobile wave. The iPhone came out when I was in high school. It seems like the author comes from a very different background.
And I guess that’s some of my frustration with this book. The author wants to moralize about technology. But it seems to come from a place of navel gazing. First by sharing her own life. Fine, but not a compelling sample size. Anecdotal evidence feels really important, but it is not real evidence. It’s one instance. And second, she doesn’t seem to understand the technology. All of her examples are ripped from other books, podcasts, and TED talks I have also mostly read and found lacking. Or her conclusions are not what I would agree with. She waxes poetic about Diogenes the Cynic as an example of a life lived on its own terms. The dude lived on the streets most of the time. Totally get it if that’s your thing. But I like my house. I’m fine exchanging some of my time for work to be able to continue to live in my house.
There’s this current of negativity around our technological lives that is easy to adopt. And I don’t think it’s authentic. I don’t mean that it’s fake, I think it’s more of a displacement of the general malease we feel at being alive. We aren’t running from predators, we aren’t constantly occupied by the search for food, so our minds have too much time to come up with neuroticisms. I think that artists, the lightning rods of felt human experience, are also very subject to this phenomenon. This book seems like it was written directly from that feeling.
So I guess, if you feel *feelings* about technology, maybe this book will help you to understand them and not feel so alone.