The book is slim but vast in scope. There are so many important things she writes about, making connections to a number of ideas that might not seem related upon first glance.
“…the need to periodically step away is more obvious than ever…we absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to. More than that, as I’ve argued this far, we need distance and time to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all…By spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle…you are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”
So often the conversation about how to avoid digital distraction or how to better manage our relationship with our devices and content/media consumption focuses on some tool or “hack” that helps us create boundaries - like instilling tech sabbaticals, keeping our devices on do not disturb, not sleeping with our phones on the bedside table. But Odell explores “the relationship between discipline, will, and attention” and how “if we’re to truly encounter anything outside of ourselves, we have to want it.” And we have to do the work of it.
“Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention…A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all“ type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. ..I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.”
