How to Do Nothing: Delete Social Media
The influence of social media. Something that has become increasingly impactful on the general public and people worldwide for that matter. It has brought people together across the world and made communication and information sharing the most efficient and effective way ever. Economically, it completely changed the way businesses market and advertise almost across the board. From a surface perspective, this seems all like positive news and yet Odell condemns social media as it is an advocate for the attention economy she encourages us to escape. She quotes Jaron Lanier when speaking about the overwhelming online environment through social media that she was living through while writing the beginning of her book. After pursuing Lanier’s works after reading the mention, I came across many that concurred with Odell’s philosophy. The paramount equivalent was Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Lets call it TA for short), a perfect supplement on a more passionate level that dives deeper into the effects social media has on people and the attention economy. Odell only briefly quotes Lanier along with a few name drops in the book yet, his arguments are ever so relevant on the topic of the “attention economy” and how social media and technology exacerbate the situation.
Odell mentions Lanier in the preface of the book when she is foreshadowing the content of the first chapter. She describes that she was in a “personal state of crisis that led [me] to the necessity of doing nothing” (Odell xx) and she reflected on the issues with the attention economy “namely its reliance on fear and anxiety, and its concomitant logic that ‘disruption’ is more productive than the work of maintenance” (Odell xx). These thoughts from Odell truly encapsulate her main issue with the “attention economy” and how that ‘disruption’ was frequently caused by a bombardment of social media and technology that seemingly engulfed her life. In Odell’s reflection, she claims that she needed to find her “nothing” but in the online environment where she “cannot make sense of anything”, the first chapter of her book comes off as a call to action to embody the human animal spirit. Odell compares the feeling to the thoughts of Jaron Lanier and how she wanted to “double down on being human” (Odell xx).
Jaron Lanier is a well known computer scientist and silicon valley refugee who fled the world of big technology and wrote numerous books mostly centralized around the intermacinations of what he saw and experienced in these massive companies. In TA, he makes it clear from the start he is going to persuade you to delete your social media and organizes his arguments into ten explicit statements. From losing your free will or the fact that social media is turning you into an asshole, he walks the readers through the hidden effects social media has on its users. By using acronyms and colloquial analogies, he effectively provides information to support his claim to make his work persuasive. Based on Odell’s mindset while writing post 2016 election, the inclusion of Jaron Lanier is very appropriate. She acknowledges technology and social media mostly in her first two chapters, but indirectly throughout the whole book. Odell does not precisely mention TA, but as Lanier’s most popular piece and its motif, the book perfectly compliments the idea of Odell and the resistance to the attention economy in most ways. While his work is often viewed as too extreme, there is a myriad of evidence and ponderous ideas that he provides. When Odell went on her accidental “digital detox” the results were similar to those that Lanier describes in his book; Odell came back happier, had a better understanding of reality, drowned out politics, and found inner joy and purity in the “animal” side of the human species. In the first chapter, she chose flight, attempting to flee from the attention economy worked, but seemed extreme and unfeasible for a large scale population. Similar to Odell in her thoughts discussed in her second chapter, Lanier is not anti-technology. Jaron Lanier even agrees that “I don’t think we have to throw the whole digital world away… the problem isn’t the smartphone…the problem isn’t the internet” (Lanier 27). As in tandem with Odell’s views, Lanier does not denounce all technology but does make his claim that “the problem in part is that we are all carrying around devices that are suitable for mass behavior modification” (Lanier 28). To most readers, the verbage resembles a dramatic line of a sci-fi thriller where robots overtake humanity. In reality, that is not the exact warning Lanier is alluding to, or is it? While extreme at times, Lanier makes excellent points that support Odell’s “attention economy” concerns and specifically the control that a small group of people have on essentially the entire country through social media.
If Odell could write more mentioning TA, she would pull quotes and ideas from the whole book, but the second chapter, Quitting Social Media is the Most Finely Targeted Way to Resist the Insanity of Our Times, hyper focuses on the ideas Odell articulates regarding social media and the attention economy. As clear with the verbiage of this chapter and Odell’s novel, both authors are calling to resist the attention economy and the best way according to Lanier is through the absence of social media. Odell would likely quote the idea of BUMMER from Lanier as well. BUMMER is an acronym for “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent” (Lanier 30). BUMMER in short “is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds” (Lanier 30). Lanier expresses the problems with BUMMER is not that it can predict all interests in users perfectly, but that the average interests or ways people feel on a large scale, are being predicted with much better accuracy than individual consumers. Odell would likely transition this into the effect social media has on politics. Take our majority two-party system in the US as an example. BUMMER can be used for regions of people based on political view or preference and then more accurately deposit advertisements, where certain infographics are placed, and who appears on your timeline, all in skew toward a certain political belief that has a higher chance to appeal to the consumer in that region. BUMMER transcends politics as it can be applied to anything; sports, news, information, climate change, you name it. Odell could use this idea of Lanier’s to help further supplement her views on how information, for example, is often pushed into the faces of virtually every human no matter the context. This directly relates to her problem with how the attention economy is seeming more involved in creating ‘disruption’ through political turmoil and instilling fear/anxiety into people, opposed to advocating for self-maintenance or mental well-being.
Odell clearly was influenced by some of Lanier’s arguments since when she mentions specifics about the attention economy and its relation to social media/tech, her philosophy is almost identical to Laniers. Odell would also likely pull from the first and seventh chapters of TA. These chapters mainly focus on the negative effects social media has on ones happiness, emotions, and freedom. A quote that stuck out from Lanier that also relates to her doctrine was, “Algorithms gorge data about you, every second. What kinds of links do you click on? What videos do you watch all the way through? How quickly are you moving from one thing to the next…”(Lanier 5)? Odell mentions this excessively about the loss of free will because of the attention economy and its influence. While Odell failed to represent the severity of social media from a more technical standpoint, her ideas align with Lanier in a big picture sense. Odell could probably write an entire new chapter where she hones in on the tech aspects of the attention economy and quotes largely from multiple works of Jaron Lanier.
While similar in general approach on the subject matter, Odell and Lanier dissent equally as much. Due to the hyper focused intention of Lanier’s piece, Odell would likely disagree with some of the more severe accusations Lanier throws at big tech such as world domination. Lanier extends his skepticism about the power of tech and social media by alluding to the belief that tech is used as spyware and suppression devices. Ideas this severe about social media and its interaction with the attention economy would likely not agree with Odell as it is not the focus of her issue with the attention economy. Yes, maybe the fact that social media abundance is used to cause disruption in the forms of fear and anxiety, but Lanier also believes that mass technology is used to track individuals and watch our every move. He believes the creation of tech was with good intentions but the governments and corporations now want to use its mass popularity for malicious intent. This idea is most apparent in the tone and style of the two authors. Odell approaches her book with the intentions of a call to action against the attention economy, but masks itself as a pathway to self-maintenance and purity. While argumentative, it has a calmer informational style by including a myriad of supplemental texts, anecdotes, and events to further portray her individual claims. Lanier, on the other hand, is aggressive from the gate with the title. His diction assaults social media and each chapter focuses on tearing it down limb by limb. The language from TA includes the strategic use of armies of acronyms and profanity to drive home his points such as BUMMER and ABCDEF. Even though they wrote in completely contradictory tones, it is quite amazing most of the general claims made by both on social media and its influence in the attention economy were analogous.
TA proves as an important supplement to Odell’s book. The arguments from Lanier, while specific about tech/social media, directly align with the ideas of Odell and likely influenced her opinions that she expresses in How to do Nothing. Lanier may have some extreme concepts at times, but the overall idea has validity through his evidence and poses as a wake up call to many readers including myself. While influential, Odell remains focused on the overall resistance to the attention economy, welcoming in a vast variety of industries instead of honing in on the social media aspects of technology. The distinctive difference between the author’s style and tone is what makes Lanier’s akin philosophies to Odell’s so valuable for analysis.
-Matt Treon
