leftovers - how to do nothing (riff-off)

Hi,

I had just a handful of additional thoughts about Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing, which I wrote about earlier this month. Why not have a classic TOA riff-off? As usual, the thought as it originally appeared in my book notes will be in italics.

Information overload - which often means without the necessary context to help with processing - leads to a sense of something missed, as all the information seems important yet we are unable to comprehend the sum. It leaves us with the familiar feeling of dread known to anyone who has spent too much time scrolling through social media feeds.

Attention span and the speed of new information should be carefully considered; otherwise, the recipient will miss the important aspects of the message.

The first of these notes reminded me of sitting in certain lecture classes and wondering just what in the world the professor was talking about. The second note reminded me of sitting for certain final exams and wondering why the professor had made the lecture so much simpler than the test. I think the two work together to make a statement about how we absorb information from the internet - it's either too much all at once, leaving us with that stupefying sensation I know from suffering a concussion, or it's so simple that you become an expert on a complicated matter after reading two tweets and a podcast synopsis. In other words, the internet balances the twin concerns of too much and too little like an overactive child jumping from one end of a see-saw to the other.

Interacting with someone - like a neighbor - forces us to explain ourselves, generally about things that we are used to having taken for granted. It also exposes us to the lifestyles of those who do not regularly live in our social circles.

In addition to my agreement with the note, I'll add a third thought - it forces a healthy self-examination. When we learn about new people, we have no choice but to expand our sense of possibility, and with this come certain questions - I made a choice between A and B, but would I have chosen differently if I had known about C? We also get a priceless opportunity to see what about us was merely propped up by past circumstance and what is truly at the core of our essence.

The story potentially presented to multiple yet unknown audiences is often stripped of its specific details, as what appeals to one audience may offend another. The modern social media star is at the intersection of all these points, where the content is engineered such that no one is ever offended, resulting in content that settles into a predictably lowest common denominator.

I wonder if this is at the root of the dissatisfaction with social media - it presents itself with the promise of free expression, yet the understood if not openly acknowledged premise is that most of what goes up on these platforms will be a highly filtered, "square peg in a round hole" representation of reality. I think there is a certain disorientation that results whenever we start living up to a watered-down version of our selves.

Break me in, teach us to cheat, and to lie, cover up, what shouldn't be shared. And the truth's unwinding, scraping away at my mind - please stop asking me to describe.

The scary thing about this time is the sense of perpetual acceleration created by the internet - if you go online and look long enough, you'll find whatever you need to confirm that things continue to get worse, as if the planet is hurtling faster and faster toward certain oblivion. What makes this worse is the understanding that although we live in the best-informed moment of human history, the only thing we've learned from the internet is that information alone is nowhere near enough to create meaningful progress. The worst thing of all is that even though we all know this, we still log on every day to gather even more of this useless information; the worst thing of all is that the root of our suffering is a self-inflicted malaise.

The next step is clear to me, which is...

...hold on...

...what? 

OK, I admit it, this note isn't from How To Do Nothing, it's from "Citizen Erased" by Muse. But this is a riff-off, so why not bring in the best? You know how these go.

Thanks for reading! More nonsense coming your way on Sunday.

reading review - how to do nothing

I mentioned a couple of years ago that a friend recommended I read Digital Minimalism, which came with the caveat that the book's idea of an "extreme" example was living without a smart phone - in other words, my life (1). This speaks to a broader idea - there are certain books that initially seem right down my alley, yet a blunt assessment of the subject matter suggests that, at the very least, I'm going to be hard to impress. It was with this unique arrogance that I opened How To Do Nothing, a book loosely organized around the idea of finding meaningful connection in a world increasingly distracted by the attention economy. 

How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell (March 2021)

It's important to note that living without a smartphone by no means precludes me from distraction. To revise a clumsy analogy from back in the summer, it's not adequate protection to keep the air conditioner going while the rest of the building is on fire. The bulk of the blame for the attention economy is perhaps rightfully aimed at the major social media companies, but I still find myself in the mess of distraction anytime I try to read an article online while scrolling past the endless ads, videos, and hyperlinks that surround, bisect, or pop-up into my field of vision; the experience of reading a newspaper online is comparable to having a librarian throw a pie in your face as you turn the pages of an overdue checkout.

I'll step back from my chaotic comparisons to highlight one of Odell's comments - the past few years have locked us into a near-permanent condition of anxiety, and it's this feeling that enables the success of social media. I have written on TOA that I see our current condition as a natural result of the internet, to which social media is only a small though crucial contributor. My broader concern is reflected in yet another of Odell's observations - our attention thrives on novelty, which means we can either willfully seek it out or leave to others the task of introducing it. The problematic aspect of the internet is the way we depend on it as a novelty machine, and over time us internet users become incapable of finding our own novelty in the unobtrusive nature of the real world.

The idea that has remained with me in the weeks after reading this book is how an erosion of attention eventually means we become unable to live up to a certain ideal for life, which I believe Odell summarized as "wanting what we want to want". This is a massively familiar feeling to me, but I could not articulate it until I saw it phrased in those exact words - there are the things that I want, and then there are the things that I want to want, and it's possible that some of the obstacles standing between the two are directly related to the way I use the internet. "What do I want?" is perhaps life's most daunting question, and I felt that way before considering the possibility that my lifestyle choices have hampered my ability to want what I want.

So, what do I want now? What do I want to want? I've read How To Do Nothing, and now I don't know what to do. My experience of living without a constant connection to the internet tempts me to wave away certain earnest calls to action. The situation is like trying to stay dry in the rain, which often requires a shift in mentality rather than concrete action; the reality is that some things about life must be accepted rather than changed. But maybe I have this wrong, my imagination dulled away by a pandemic year spent at the screen, leaving me incapable of envisioning a novel response to the question of the digital age. Modern technology is draining away certain qualities that we once considered invaluable, and if this happens to bother you then doing nothing isn't an option.

TOA Rating: Three smartphones out of four.

Footnotes

1) By the way, I did read Newport's book, and I intend to write about it at some point in 2021. This may surprise some readers - why read a book that seems to be about me? The flip side is, why not read such a book? Don't we all love to read about ourselves? Isn't that the most interesting kind of reading?