Ten Reasons for Doing Nothing: Reading Jenny Odell, Reading Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
By: Miranda Askey
Tags: Corruption, Relax, Social Media, Spying

Ten Reasons for Doing Nothing: Reading Jenny Odell, Reading Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Miranda Askey Dec 1, 2020·8 min read

In Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, she references a myriad of resources to aid the delivery of her “project”. Odell implements examples such as works of art, authors and their writings, along with educational lectures and even references to audio recordings. On page xx of the introduction, Odell says, “…you’ll find that this book is a bit oddly shaped. The arguments and observations I’ll make are not neat, interlocking parts in a logical whole. Rather, I saw and experienced many things during the course of writing it — things that changed my mind and then changed it again, and which I folded in as I went.” I found this quote fascinating in regards to the vast array of books she mentions throughout, because while many of the books or authors listed may be extremely different from one another, each had a purpose and Odell was able to successfully utilize them in explaining or expanding upon her arguments and statements.

Jaron Lanier, author of the book I chose to read, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, is mentioned twice in How to do Nothing. First on page xx, and again later on page 161. On xx, Odell speaks about her first chapter of the book, “Written in the midst of an online environment in which I could no longer make sense of anything the essay was a plea on behalf of the spatially and temporally embedded human animal; like the technology writer Jaron Lanier, I sought to ‘double down on being human’.” On this page she also names some of her personal “serious grievances with the attention economy” such as “its reliance on fear and anxiety”. Lanier talks in depth about manipulative social media companies, and the psychology behind addiction in the chapter titled “Argument One: You Are Losing Your Free Will”. “People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgement and competition…Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal.” Lanier uses the examples of the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment, to expound upon the idea that normal people can be coerced into doing things through social pressure. He says “On social networks, the manipulation of social emotions has been the easiest way to generate rewards and punishments.” Rewards on social media come from validation, such as getting a certain amount of likes, reposts, or complimentary comments, whereas punishments can come from the opposite: not enough likes, reposts, or mean comments. Lanier says, “…negative feedback turns out to be the bargain feedback, the best choice for business, so it appears more often on social media.” He also goes on to describe greed and advertising; what was once seen as merely “advertisement” has become what many now call “behavioral modification”. Big corporations have started preying on technology addicted individuals, and using extremely calculated and specific algorithms in efforts to grab our attention as well as our wallets. These algorithms are very specific person to person, your phone/computer can track how many seconds or minutes you spend looking at something, and then calculate when to show you a specific ad. Companies who once called themselves advertisers have truly morphed into predators who attempt to take advantage of people’s time, energy, and money. “…Advances in computing happened to coincide with ridiculously perverse financial incentives.” Odell similarly states that she believes individuals’ identities are at risk of becoming “a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised and appropriated, like units of capital.”

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The second instance in which Odell references Lanier occurs on page 161, where she talks about Joshua Meyrowitz’s book, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1985). Odell refers to a section where Meyrowitz writes about a trip he took in college. Upon return he was eager to recount certain aspects of the trip to different people like his friends, parents, or professors, and explained that each story would be slightly different depending on the audience. He then asks readers to imagine a hypothetical scenario where each of those audiences were together, and he would have to tell them all what his trip was like. “He ventures that he would have either 1) offended one or more of the groups, or 2) created a ‘synthesized’ account that was ‘bland enough to offend no one’…Taken to its logical conclusion, Option 2 would eventually create a race to the mediocre bottom that has been repeatedly decried by cultural critics like Jaron Lanier.” Although both times Lanier is mentioned neither reference includes any of his writings, I still became interested in him and did some research. Lanier is an American author, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of contemporary classical music. He is devoutly against the overuse of social media and technology. This is quite fascinating because he was one of the earliest pioneers of virtual reality, and even founded VPL research, a company that sold VR products and aided in technological advances in VR applications. He later became one of the fiercest critics of the new digital world, due to the fact that he came from the inside, he knew so much of what was going on behind the scenes. Both Lanier and Odell are very familiar with the Silicon Valley area, home to countless start-up and international technology companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google. It is interesting that they both, while surrounded by such technological driven societies, have the power to step back and urge others to limit their technological/social media use. Lanier is the author of several other books but I thought Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now would be the best choice, as it has many parallels with Odell’s writing.

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Odell’s How to do Nothing is not as persuasive as Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Odell’s book is more giving readers advice on maintaining a better balance between work and play, as well as their relationship with technology, whereas, Lanier is much more determined to convince readers specifically to delete all social media, leaving much less room for interpretation. Lanier lays out the book in ten arguments serving as individual chapters, with various smaller sections within the larger chapters. Each includes supporting evidence and facts to defend the claim, and to persuade the reader, very different from Odell’s writing in that she is much less structured. Each chapter presents new information that gets progressively more eye opening and surprising as you go along.

What once was seen as a fun and innocent way to keep in touch with friends has become the root of so much personal and societal anguish. There are so many addictive properties of social media that have made it extremely difficult to stray away from, but Lanier urges readers to do so as an act of self preservation. As a teenager who has grown up in a technological society, and who has been using social media for years, I was shocked to learn some of the terrible effects of social media. Some of the most compelling facts were presented by scientists, as well as people who were once heavily involved in producing some of the biggest social media platforms such as Facebook. Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook says, “The short term, dopamine driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works… no civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth… I feel tremendous guilt…I think in the back, deep, deep recesses, we kind of knew something really bad could happen… so we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion.” I was so surprised to read this because of the self awareness he exhibits.

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In “Argument Two: Quitting Social Media is the Most Finely Targeted Way To Resist The Insanity of Our Times”, Lanier introduces readers to the term BUMMER, an acronym for the phrase “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent.” Essentially, he explains the ways in which social media companies accumulate our personal information and patterns of activity, which is then analyzed and used to make users more “engaged”, or in reality addicted, to social media which creates wealth for these big corrupt companies. He even says that you can identify a BUMMER platform by learning whether or not a certain company attracts attention or spending from Russian state intelligence warfare units to manipulate people. While Odell does acknowledge the financial incentives and corporate influence behind social media, she does not go quite as in depth explaining the true corruption and technicality behind the scenes.

Not only does Lanier hope you’ll stop using social media because you’re being manipulated and spied upon, but also he argues that it is making people into bigger “assholes”, it is “making you unhappy”, it is “making politics impossible”, and it is “undermining the truth”. Each claim is an independent argument with its own chapter including extensive explanations, facts, statistics, as well as Lanier’s personal opinions. Overall, all ten unique arguments are very informative and impactful, I have begun to consciously use social media less, and might consider deleting them in the future, because while I have learned a lot from this book, I still want to preserve my choice to use social media when I feel is right.

Based on the title and the information I have presented thus far, one may assume that Lanier is a hater of all technology and social media, however this is not necessarily the case. Rather, he is keen on what social media has become, and the “bad actors”/corporations involved. “I don’t think we have to throw the whole digital world away. A lot of it is great!” He explains that the problem with social media is not people connecting with one another and sharing pictures, but instead when these platforms are “driven by a business model in which the incentive is to find customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behavior.” To illustrate this claim, Lanier compares social media to paint that once contained lead. Years ago, when it became clear that lead was extremely harmful, no one proclaimed that houses should never be painted again, alternatively after pressure and legislation, lead free paint became the new standard. He connects the statements by saying, “Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.” Odell comparably asserts that she does not disavow technology and social media entirely, in fact she acknowledges that it can be incredibly useful, however she recognizes the addictive properties and downsides of technology and social platforms that have been influenced by large greedy corporations, which is why she urges readers to disengage from the attention economy.

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Ultimately, I found both Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, as well as Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, fascinating. Both were similar in their core message: too much technology is very bad and we should all take a step back for our own good, yet they had quite different deliveries. While Odell does not explicitly refer to Lanier’s book in her writing, I can see why she values his insight and would feel confident referring to him in her writing to strengthen her argument.