Pay Attention

I have a confession or, more precisely, I had a confession. Until very recently, despite being a librarian and life-long passionate reader, I never had an answer to the question: “What book has changed your life?” Now, I can definitely say that a book has changed my life, but I’m still embarrassed to tell you what it is. Shouldn’t it be Virginia Woolf or Tolstoy? Or something else very Serious and Important? Alas, the book is a self-help book, the kind of book intended to change your life. I was ready for this one, and it worked on me: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, available from the library in print and as an eBook and audiobook. It didn’t change the course of my life, but it changed how I experience my daily life and what I do with my time.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World explores the methods used by “digital minimalists” to organize their lives, despite living in our maximally digital world. It depicts overuse of digital technology – phones, apps, social media, even streaming services – as an addiction. An addiction that creates enormous profits and influence for tech companies the way addiction to cigarettes creates enormous profits for tobacco companies. Newport, a professor of computer science and author of books on focus and productivity, recommends a “30-Day Digital Detox” in which you drastically and thoughtfully reduce your phone, computer, and social media use. For my detox, I deleted the Twitter app from my phone, changed the password, and hid the password in a file on my computer. I also deleted the YouTube app so I couldn’t mindlessly scroll through it. I reserved news reading for two specific times of day. (I am not currently involved in any Meta-products, but Facebook and Instagram are common detox targets for others.)

I haven’t looked back! It has now been four times thirty days and the changes I made are still in practice. Please note, this is a highly individual process, and technology that you reject, restrict, or decide to keep is about your own life and not mine. The point of the detox and digital minimalism is not to reject technology that could benefit you, but to carefully consider if a particular technology is benefiting you. If the downsides outweigh the benefits, think about why you still want it in your life. Is it serving you or are you serving it?

The crux of this is our attention. What do you want to pay attention to? I noticed that I would pull out my phone to check the time, automatically unlock the phone without thinking, and suddenly be scrolling, having forgotten the time completely. I’d rather be reading, or even be staring out a window.

Digital Minimalism provided a concrete and practical plan to reclaim my attention, but a source of earlier inspiration was How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by artist and writer Jenny Odell. This is not a self-help book, but an essay and a manifesto. The “nothing” of the title “is only nothing from the point of view of capitalist productivity,” Odell writes. How to Do Nothing is a plan of action, but not exactly for individuals - more for collectives, more for communities. Odell recommends what she calls “movements:” “dropping out” - “a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us;” and a “movement into place” (as in, the place you inhabit right now.)

“Unless we are vigilant,” says Odell, “the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community.” Far-reaching and inspiring, the book touches on performance art, bird-watching, Google Earth, Deep Listening, the history of union organizing, Epicurus, communes, and much more. Also, in the acknowledgements section, she thanks two crows that regularly visit her balcony. “I hope that the figure of ‘doing nothing’ in opposition to a productivity-obsessed environment can help restore individuals who can then help restore communities, human and beyond.” I hope so too.

In Attention: A Love Story (another edition has the subtitle: A Personal History of Finding Focus (Or Trying To), Casey Schwartz writes that the “inner state” is “the single greatest resource for any writer.” That, I think, is why I am so concerned with attention in particular: I write fiction, and the quality of my attention is my primary resource. Not only my ability to focus on my writing while I am doing it, but my ability to pay attention to the world I live in: small moments, my own thoughts. Schwartz, a journalist with a background in neuroscience and psychoanalysis, was addicted to Adderall for a decade. Having recovered, she wonders, “Stripped of my pills in an age of distraction, what did it even mean to pay attention?” To find that meaning, Schwartz investigated the thinking of William James, Simone Weil, Aldous Huxley, and others. She traveled to Silicon Valley, the source of so much of our attention’s cooption. She met consultants, therapists, and psychedelic evangelists, all to find out not only how to pay attention, but what attention really is. One thread I found compelling is the connection between attention and memory. If we fail to pay attention to something, we fail to deposit it in our “memory banks” and we lose it altogether. “To pay attention is to believe there is something worth paying attention to. Even if you don’t yet know of what it consists. Even if it hasn’t been preselected by an algorithm to play to your interests.” [Content warning: as described above, this book contains detailed descriptions of drug use and addiction.]

Schwartz quotes Tristan Harris, the former Google “Design Ethicist” who founded the Center for Humane Technology: “You could say that it’s my responsibility to practice self-control over digital devices, but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” Despite my new digital minimalism practices, the state of attention in 2022 is not only about individual willpower: we are all affected by the attention economy. Newport, Odell, and Schwartz all discuss it in their books from different angles. To further understand the attention economy, I placed The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu at the top of my to-read list. Wu is a law professor and, it is always pointed out, coiner of the phrase “net neutrality.” The Attention Merchants is a history and critique of the business model that gives us “free” content and services in exchange for our attention: the business model in which we are really the product being sold to advertisers. Wu argues that this history begins not with the 20^th century dawn of the internet as we might imagine, but in the 19^th century with penny newspapers. I think it will be illuminating to track this ubiquitous phenomenon from the beginning.

I will return to these books and find others (see below), any time I feel out of control and in need of an attention pep talk. I also have an invitation for you: public libraries can be cradles of attention. We offer quiet and peaceful spaces, spaces that are not your home or workplace, all for free. Curiosity is the spark of attention, and in the library, you can spend all day with your curiosity, asking questions, looking for answers, thinking of more questions, and making connections. You can soak in a novel or give a poem a close, loving reading. I hope you’ll join us.

Further Reading

• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
• Inhabiting the Negative Space: Virtual Commencement 2020, Harvard University Graduate School of Design by Jenny Odell
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
• The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age by Howard Axelrod
• Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle
• How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price

- Corina Bardoff, West Windsor Branch