There are many ways to plant one’s attention in the historical, public, and physical realm. This opens the door for a conversation, even if all you’re looking at is a blue jay puffing and preening up close using binoculars. The thing about bird watching along a busy creek path is that people see you with binoculars and want to know what you’re looking at. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here). That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention.
The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy the other half is about reengaging with something else. While reading it and since reading it, rather than sitting around doing nothing, I’ve been actively working on my own resistance and paying more attention to my…attention. The subtitle, “resisting the attention economy,” more accurately describes the intent of the book.
Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is a strong contribution to the anti-productivity movement, but the title might be a little misleading. I wish I had found some flowers for a backdrop, but it was winter in Colorado and hadn’t been snowing, so my options were brown or brown.
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