Hello all, and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! If you were a little surprised to see a notification pop up today, I can understand. Christmas festivities often involve pushed-back obligations and a weekend full of festivities. Many log off, spend time with friends or family, or spend a long, quiet weekend indulging in some self-care. It’s not a time often associated with productivity or reading book reflections from tiny blogs on a little corner of the internet. 

So, why am I posting my last book reflection on Christmas Day? Well, I’d argue that I agreed to a regular posting schedule for the year and I plan on keeping it. There is another part of me, though, that wonders if I haven’t fallen into the pit of online productivity culture, so obsessed with meeting my content quota that I refuse to take a holiday off. Perhaps it’s a little of Column A, a little of Column B. For a more in-depth answer, I’ll look to artist Jenny Odell, author of this month’s Book of the Month, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. 

While it focuses briefly on the pressure to produce and optimize our daily lives, How to Do Nothing primarily tackles how capitalism and technology are collaborating to steal one of our most precious resources: our attention. Referencing everything from ancient Greek philosophers to our last Book of the Month, Braiding Sweetgrass, Odell lays out how our attention has been shifted and monetized via social media. By laying out the general methodology, consequences, resistance tactics, and hopes for a differently-attentive future, How to Do Nothing aims to bring awareness to how we interact with the world around us. While I did find places where Odell’s work falters, the quality and quantity of thought-provoking concepts the book presented were enough to keep it on solid ground. 

The ideas that caught me the most were, admittedly, ones I’d heard before. I’ve been active on the internet since I was eleven or twelve, participating in everything from forums to chat rooms to flash game sites. There is a vast difference between the “old net” and the current internet landscape, differences that people my age have been talking about in small groups for a few years. Finding a book where those same ideas are repeated back to you with citations, sources, and supporting arguments is both comforting and unsettling. This strange recognition continued to pop up throughout the book, recontextualizing the thoughts I’ve shared with others about the modern internet and my experience running this blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the concepts in particular: how social media (and the internet in general) can destroy context and flatten a person into a marketable commodity. Use this blog as an example. In creating this blog, I focused on my love of reading, writing, and drinking tea. I write to the most general audience possible, trying to attract anyone with any interest in the three subjects I write about, making my work as “acceptable” to as many people as possible. I’ve kept my face and full name off this blog, for some modicum of privacy. Yet, that loss of context about who I am, my life, and even my name, flatten my presence down to a very specific, marketable instance. The interests I express make me easy to market to. To divulge more about my life or opinions opens me up to the potential of destructive forces, my context-less existence putting distance between my online presence and my base humanity.

With everyone now expected to have a personal “brand” or, at the very least, a social media profile, this constant simplifying and generalizing of our behavior to be as acceptable as possible keeps anyone from knowing anyone. It also keeps us from changing; the person who wrote that off-color joke ten years ago may have grown, but that joke remains in the vast archives of the internet, ready for someone to find and tear them down. Even this idea, which could easily be misconstrued as a critique of cancel culture, could be taken out of context to be used against me. The flattening and context collapse of the internet makes it so easy for others to think of the usernames on the internet as not-quite-real human beings, leading to abuse and dogpiling that would be unheard of in a physical, real-world setting.

This is another of the many, many ideas Odell brings up in How to Do Nothing, known as the “I – It” vs. “I – Thou” mindsets coined by Michael Buber. She also digs into the desire for an impossible escape from technology, referencing both the hippie communes of the 70s and modern-day tech retreats. As short as this book is, it is jam-packed with revelations and “a-ha” moments that made me set the book down and process. It is a rare book that manages to fit in a lot of good theory within a manageable page limit. 

That said, the book fell into a few predictable traps. As someone who has written this way before, and knows and loves several people who write this way, Odell’s voice and her heavy use of quotes falls into what I call the “Artist MFA Thesis” voice. Every other sentence feels like a quote or a synopsis of a study, and each chapter has twenty to thirty citations. When she wasn’t citing her sources or pulling direct quotes from others, she was writing paragraphs with complex sentences and jargon specific to technology or political philosophy. It read less like a book and more like a thesis paper to submit to a panel. This voice, while useful in academic contexts, can be a chore to work through if you aren’t used to it. 

Another pitfall is that, when using her “Artist MFA Thesis” voice, she writes for an audience already familiar with her ideas. Casually throwing around words like “anticapitalist” and “mesh networks”, Odell is assuming the reader to have a similar background either to herself or to the community she engages with. This is frustrating as this is someone who, living in a high-cost-of-living area, manages to make her living as an artist, having time and funding to write a book where she goes on several mountainside cabins to write or walk at her leisure in a public garden. Many of us don’t have such luxuries. As much as I agree with many of her political views, the way she writes will likely alienate some from the concepts she presents, simply due to the way she presents them.

Still, the times How to Do Nothing lost its footing were quickly propped back up by the solid theoretical work within the pages. While I felt like the book was an overall mixed bag, it was short, and I enjoyed what I found within. It gave me plenty to think about in relation to my social media usage and my work on this blog. I would recommend it to those who grew up on the old internet, or those that find themselves looking for a way to re-think their relationship with social media. How to Do Nothing is a useful primer for those unfamiliar with the addictive nature of the capitalist internet, how to resist it, and where you should focus your attention instead. With that said, I’ll let you all get back to your long weekend and your Christmas festivities. Look forward to next week’s blog where, in the spirit of How to Do Nothing, I’ll be going over what’s in store for the Tea Reads blog in 2023 and what you can expect for the future. Thank you for reading and sticking with me this year. Have a happy New Year– see you in January!