“If we only have so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.”—Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
I’m going to be tweeting a lot less. I don’t have the following to justify a newsletter just yet, but I do have a blog tab here, and that’s reason enough to redirect the energy I might expend tweeting into longer, more considered thoughts—at least once a week, anyway. And, like booking a workout class or promising my boyfriend that I’ll walk the dog a certain number of times a week, I’m hoping calling this “Thursday Thoughts” and pushing it out into the world will hold me accountable to collecting my reflections like this regularly.
I ended 2019 reading Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, took a detour into darkly fantastic fiction, and then followed up with Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. Taken as a trio, these three books didn’t necessarily change the way I look at my iPhone, but they certainly called my bluff. Like so many of us, I’ve spent years bemoaning a little black box full of endless content, even as I refuse to look away from it. And I’m exactly the right age (and in the same generational cohort as all three of the above authors) to have grown up with social media in its modern form: weaned on MySpace, early to Facebook, on Twitter when it seemed like a passing fad, posting to Instagram before Facebook snatched it up.
Trick Mirror covers a range of topics, from reality TV to the wedding-industrial complex, but the first essay, “The I in the Internet,” drilled itself into my brain. I’ve been recommending it to everyone who’ll listen; one friend who read it is deactivating her Facebook account. Tolentino, from her time at Jezebel to her current post at The New Yorker, is uniquely skilled at putting our age group’s malaise into focus, largely because she avoids being prescriptive. She doesn’t offer answers, because so many of the problems we’re trying to solve just don’t have them, or at least don’t have solutions that won’t cascade into other problems. “The I in the Internet” is peak Tolentino, in that she cuts to the heart of why the current social-media landscape is so hellish: it’s not just that we all think we have something to say, but that we feel duty-bound and actively encouraged to say it, no matter how uninformed or unnecessary our contributions may be.
Odell’s provocatively titled How to Do Nothing certainly has a lot of Odell in it (she’s quite the birder!), but it’s a sociological text, not a memoir. If Trick Mirror’s lead essay put into words the general unease I have with social media, Odell spends her page count not just explaining how we got here, but how serious the ramifications of an always-on world can get, on personal, societal, and even environmental levels.
Of the three, Uncanny Valley has the least to “say,” but I still devoured it in under 48 hours. Weiner was a go-nowhere assistant at a literary agency just as the most recent start-up boom took off, and found herself shipping off from NYC to San Francisco, shedding more and more of her literary-world pride and moral misgivings the longer she stayed. Of course, we know before opening the book how it ends: Weiner is back in the book world, albeit on a different side of the contract negotiation.
While I got the sense that I’d have bristled at Weiner’s pretensions had we met during her Brooklyn days, reading her firsthand account of what happens when you give a bunch of under-25 software engineers untold sums of money and embolden them to turn the world upside down was a 275-page sustained panic attack. Whether because of NDAs or just a clever editorial choice, Weiner never identifies the startups and apps by name, but it’s always clear who she’s talking about, as one industry after another gets “disrupted,” and immense violations of personal privacy are brushed aside in the name of optimization.
Weiner’s memoir is full of the kind of people who would take Odell’s awareness advice in exactly the wrong way—who think the point of life is “hacking” your body and routines for superhuman productivity; for whom something like a walk through a garden to listen for birds would be a waste of time unless it offered a direct correlation to increased work output afterward.
Back to birds, because I have tickets to see Birds of Prey shortly, and because this essay was supposed to be about a certain blue bird.
“I think often about how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding,” Odell writes in How to Do Nothing. “This is its own form of ‘research,’ and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy.”
Most of us are aware that the bird app, to steal a naming convention from Weiner, is not a good use of our time and energy. When I have conversations with other comic creators, we all complain about the petty dramas that blow up and go away just as quickly; the false familiarity it creates, and the expectations that come with that barrier coming down; peers who use it for dopamine hits, at the expense of their integrity. We all say we wish we could get famous enough to not have to use it, as if it’s in all of our contracts that we must communicate primarily in 280-character bursts.
There are benefits to social media like the bird app, and I have made friends and fruitful connections because of it. Meaningful change in the industry has come, often too slowly, from conversations started by rapid-fire thumbs. But I’ve also wasted countless hours that I’ll never have back, expended untold energy arguing with strangers I’ll never meet and whose minds I’ll never change. At the beginning of what’s sure to be an absolutely unbearable election year, moving away from context-deprived communication is one of the easiest, smartest, kindest decisions I can make.
The bird app—all of the apps, really—counts on my FOMO getting the best of me. It knows I will be tempted by all the adorable animal videos I won’t see, the breaking news I’ll discover long after it’s broken, the in-jokes I won’t get, the connection I won’t make. I lived in New York for four years before I had a smartphone and an endlessly scrolling app, so I know it’s possible to wait for subway trains and stand in bagel lines without it, even if it feels like an active detox program to do so.
The other thing that I talk about often with fellow creators is that the app is not the real world. Even when it feels omni-present, like every reader and potential reader is logged on and waiting to weigh in, it’s really nothing more than a small segment of our ecosystem. If you walk into a brick-and-mortar comic store and talk to the first 15 customers you meet about something that’s tearing the bird app apart, 14 of them will probably give you an awkward nod and shuffle past you to buy their Batman comic in blissful ignorance.
I can’t expect to do the same—this is an Eden/apple/snake situation—but I want my context back, and my time, and I have the power to reclaim both of those things.
And so I will.