It takes faith to resist the attention economy

The day I started my sabbatical, I found myself wandering the aisles of Target. I am enough of a suburban middle-aged White lady that Target trips are inherently delightful—or at least they used to be, before the pandemic drained the pleasure from any sort of public activity. Feeling like I had all the time in the world, I browsed the book aisle. I nearly chuckled into my face mask when a paperback caught my attention: How to Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell. Of course I bought the book. Considering that my original sabbatical plan consisted of once-in-a-lifetime overseas trips and, comparatively, my pandemic sabbatical would consist of doing a whole lot of nothing, I figured I needed the handbook.

As many of the less-than-effusive reader reviews will tell you, Odell’s book isn’t really about doing nothing. Full disclosure: I was less than effusive in my own brief Goodreads take on the book. I had wanted to learn how to do nothing, but instead Jenny Odell made me think very hard about something. The real thrust of the book is located in its subtitle, which I barely noticed as I dropped it in my red cart: Resisting the Attention Economy.

It seems lots of folks are paying attention to the so-called attention economy these days. This winter, a New York Times op-ed by Charlie Warzel featured the work of Michael Goldhaber, a theoretical physicist who popularized the concept of a zero-sum economy of attention decades ago. “In an attention economy, one is never not on, at least when one is awake, since one is nearly always paying, getting or seeking attention,” Goldhaber once observed (shortly before Facebook launched its attention-captivating, endlessly scrolling News Feed, Warzel notes).