How to Do Something: Rejecting the Attention Economy
By Joshua Gainey
In Chapter 3 of Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, there is a discussion of a strike held in 1934 by SanFranciscan longshoremen. The longshoremen worked on the docks unloading cargo from ships. They had terrible working conditions. The work was grueling physical labor and the shifts that they lined up for were unpredictable, lasting anywhere from “two to thirty hours.” (Odell 90) Behind the scenes, they unionized and organized a strike that stretched over two-thousand miles of the riverfront. Their employers were shown that the mistreatment of their workers would no longer be tolerated; change was required for any relationship to continue.
In our current attention economy, we find ourselves in the same plight as the longshoremen. We are victims of similar injustices regarding our time, personal space, and dignity. It is not our employers who are abusing us and treating us as a commodity, it is our social media outlets which are cleverly disguised as being helpful and even entertaining means through which we connect with the world. The social media companies are harming our well beings for their personal gain, just as the longshoremen’s employers were exploiting them.
Odell aligns the actions of the longshoremen with the “third space,” because the laborers were acting and organizing outside the norm. The “third space” is a concept from Odell’s book where an individual can inhabit a different mental plane and is able to exist surrounded by and yet refuse temptation from attention-grabbing entities. (Odell 69) She thinks that as long as you are able to see what is going on and not fall prey to it, it is still acceptable to participate with a cynical eye. I believe cynical participation is being complicit. Because the longshoremen refused to continue participation at all until working conditions improved, I think the anecdote of the longshoremen fairly obviously aligns more with “dropping out” or a true refusal-in-place than a “third space” as Odell suggests.
The addictive design features implemented by the attention economy are well documented as are other detrimental effects on our health and wellbeing. The biggest difference between the longshoremen and you is that your livelihood is not dependent on Facebook. We can all quit right this moment and we will all be just fine (maybe feeling a little lonely or bored, but not jobless or starving). Then Facebook, or whatever company we are striking from, would need to correct course or disintegrate.
Odell says that quitting Facebook is impractical and “fighting the battle on the wrong plane.” She worries, for example, that if we quit social media we will remove ourselves from political discourse. But what political discourse of any consequence is actually happening via these avenues? In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman explains that different types of medium lend to different types of information and discourse.
“Television serves us most usefully when presenting junk entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse — news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion — and turns them into entertainment packages. We would be better off if television got worse, not better.” (Postman 159)
As Odell mentions in her book, the internet provides no context — it’s everywhere and always, and so it is nearly impossible to hold a conversation especially when broadcasting to the world throughout all time. Postman identifies this problem in the technology present thirty-five years ago as the “Now…this” world view. He explains how newscasters often transition from story to story with a “Now..this” without any meaningful transition or connection to the previous story. “We are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness.” (Postman 100) Serious subjects require serious attention. Due to its short-form, context-free nature, the medium of social media does not lend itself to the complex nature of politics and other serious subject matter.
Social media doesn’t just make light of serious topics, it also disassociates community members from their sense of responsibility to them and renders useless the modes by which we could connect with current issues in proactive ways. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam investigates the severe reduction in civic engagement and the erosion of social capital. His conclusion to why American communities spend less time in community clubs and at town meetings is due to the individualization of digital entertainment, meaning there is so much for us to consume that we ignore our fellow community members, political responsibilities, and natural surroundings. Social media is the epitome of personalized entertainment with its use of algorithms to bring you a fresh feed of information tailored to you every time you refresh your page. This overabundance of consumable information turns us into drones who are unaware of, much less engaged with, our civic responsibilities.
Turning serious subjects into entertainment and transplanting people from their communal context is a big problem in itself, but sometimes users are actually being manipulated as pawns in a political game through social media outlets. For example, in the 2016 General Election, the Muller investigation proved that Russian entities ran propaganda on social media to influence American voters. (Parks) On a platform where anyone is able to post anything that they want, it is impossible to stop the spread of misinformation. Particularly in a culture such as Facebook where people intentionally group themselves with other like-minded individuals, group-think is not only unavoidable but is a predictable outcome. People flock to Facebook for personal news from family members and friends, but may instead end up consuming and even spreading rumors or deceptions to the people they care about.
On the individual level, social media does provide us some things we could consider benefits. Aside from being entertaining, it provides a sort of searchable digital directory where we can look up individuals and find friends we have lost contact with. But the idea of connection is one of the largest misnomers on social media -contact is more appropriate as any connection you make on these platforms is low quality. Moreover, it comes with some terrible side-effects like the constant comparison of our own lives with the curated persona of our friends and the anxiety that stems from the fear of missing out. The use of these platforms can erode our self-worth as we never seem to match up with others and we clamor for likes and retweets as a sign of affirmation.
My wife and I have both taken steps to escape the chains of the attention economy and have seen the personal benefits of their complete removal. I used to constantly check Facebook to see if I had new messages or posts. I wasted so much time just sitting at my computer watching my feed. I would become anxious every time I made a post and wondered if anyone would “like” it. I started to realize the net negative impact of social media on my mental wellbeing and knew something needed to change. I quit using the platforms one at a time; I added barriers to accessing the sites so that I had to purposefully visit them in order to end up on the site. I removed bookmarks, turned off notifications and badges, deleted or buried apps, and unsubscribed from email subscriptions and notifications as they were just reminders to check the site.
In removing my access points to social media, I have cut off entry points to my mind for the anxieties that always ambushed me there. I have a healthier relationship with technology now and I also pay more attention to the people around me. I not only keep up with politics now, but I care about what is happening in my community and around the world. After I quit social media, I realized that it had created an overwhelming sense of uselessness and anxiety in me that prevented me from being cognizant of current issues much less feeling a sense of competency to change them for the better.
My wife, Brianna, quit all social media simultaneously a few years back. She deleted profiles and removed the apps from her phone. Here is how she describes the experience.
“Eliminating social media has removed the relationship clutter from my life. I now have fewer points of contact with the world outside my own home, but the connections I do have are much more valuable. By decreasing my availability, I discovered who among my “friends” was willing to go an extra mile to converse with me personally and directly. Now I spend less time thinking about and staying current with social media accounts and I have more energy to spend investing in the people I care about most. As a result of narrowing my focus, I have a better relationship with myself, with my husband and children, and with my closest friends and relatives, and I am able to be more present in the experiences I share with them without the distraction of an unseen audience. But dropping social media hasn’t just subtracted people from my life. Deleting my Facebook account freed up my schedule and strengthened my resolve to explore and make new friends in a new city. I wonder if I would have gotten to know the man who would become my husband if I hadn’t gotten myself off of the wifi in that bookstore cafe where I used to spend my after-work hours checking my “wall” and trying to feel in touch with friends thousands of miles away. I also now have a pen-pal; she is 95 years old. I doubt I would have had the patience to develop such a rewarding friendship had I still been habitually scrolling through my Instagram feed sustaining a plethora of less diverse and more superficial connections. Sometimes, as a result of our being “disconnected” from social apps (or, rather, being more directly engaged with our closest friends) my husband and I are the last to know about news and we may sometimes miss minor events entirely, but we are happier to have a curated social life that enhances our lives rather than distracting us from them.”
The business model for social media platforms relies on views and time spent. If we are to expect change in that business model then we need to be like the longshoremen and say “We’ve had quite enough.” We need to quit using the sites that are purposefully designed to keep our attention far longer than necessary and tricking us into thinking we need to come back and check them constantly. Personalized entertainment is the reason political discourse and social capital have eroded. Individuals who could be making a positive difference in their communities are, under the influence of social media, either completely paralyzed or are being manipulated to do the bidding of those who do not have them or their community's best interests in mind. Though it poses to be reality, social media is escapism, and removing it creates awareness and an ability to notice. When your mind is cleared of the noise of distractions, you realize the responsibility to the community of which you have been ignorant. When we are able to truly connect with our friends and loved ones, we no longer sustain the insecurities that social media feeds on. Being mindful of our attention brings great rewards for ourselves, our community, and those we love.
Bibliography
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn, NY, Melville Home Publishing, 2019.
Parks, Miles. “Mueller’s Report Shows All The Ways Russia Interfered In 2016 Presidential Election.” npr.org, 18 April 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/714810702/muellers-report-shows-all-the-ways-russia-interfered-in-2016-presidential-electi. Accessed 18 October 2020.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. 20th Anniversary ed., New York, NY, Penguin Group, 1985.
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
