HOW DOES DROPBOX WORK EVEN OFFLINE HOW TO
HOW DOES DROPBOX WORK EVEN OFFLINE OFFLINE

“And so, I think of a lot of the stuff in the book as being something that you do in the meantime-the ‘meantime’ being between now and an ideal situation.”

“It's not possible to completely exit the situation,” says Odell. Put another way, it’s a way to inhabit the in-between.

HOW DOES DROPBOX WORK EVEN OFFLINE HOW TO

And even if you don’t consider yourself outdoorsy, empowering yourself to retrain your attention is Odell’s suggestion for surviving the right now while we figure out how to achieve that better, other world. Many of us would be harming our livelihood if we left social media, or, at the very least, our social calendars. She understands that for most of us, completely dropping off the internet isn’t a practical solution.

HOW DOES DROPBOX WORK EVEN OFFLINE OFFLINE

She poses that retraining your attention on nature is a way of “giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.”Īmerica offline isn’t the answer, but in the meantime. Odell’s book could be reduced to a hippie appeal to save Mother Earth with a modern gloss-white tech veneer – Less screen time, more time outdoors! But it’s smarter than that and Odell is far more interesting than that. Unlike the unexpectedness of nature with its blooming flowers and migrating birds, growing and thriving independent of you and your thoughts and your wants and your desires and the need to sell you something. You’re only seeing what is intentionally being served to you. Like, you're seeing a lot of different things.” But you’re not. Odell explains, “The more time you spend on it, it feels like everything's being represented there, 'cause it's a lot. The internet is vast and shape-shifts based on algorithms designed to present you with what you want. Each social media platform, streaming service, or any other entity of the internet desperate for your time serves as a gated community for attention, walling you off from the distractions of the physical world.

But with the link between social media use and increased depression and loneliness established, this disappearance into the digital ether is no peaceful escape.Ĭentral to Odell’s book is the tension between consuming a reality created for you versus creating your own reality. She asks in the introduction, “What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?” Odell argues that when we lack an understanding or awareness of our place in the natural world, our lives are stripped of context and we’re more prone to abandon what’s real for the allure of whatever’s happening on the internet. “When I talk in the book about moving your attention around or directing your attention-those are kind of intentional things that you can do with your own consciousness.” In large part, Odell’s new book is about how developing a fluency in the flora and fauna in her daily life allows her to stay present in the real world, instead of retreating into the digital landscape of the internet. “I have been trying to talk about the core ideas from the book, but make them translatable to a wider context than me liking birds.”

Everyone has difficulties with doing nothing for different kinds of reasons.” But that doesn’t mean you can’t develop your own form of resistance. Even just simple things, like not everyone loves the outdoors. While Odell is moved that her book is resonating deeply with so many people, over the phone, she tells me, “After the book published, I realized how specific to me a lot of the stuff is and maybe doesn't work for everyone. Could the answer be as simple as just taking a walk around the block? And yet, many of us can’t seem to put our phones down and just walk away from it all. In the past year, alone we’ve seen Congress question Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter ban literal neo-Nazis from their platform. How to Do Nothing has found an audience among those concerned about the amount of time we spend on the internet, the troubling stats emerging about social media use, and questionable policies around data privacy. That even someplace like the Bay area has seasons, if you’re paying attention, “Just things like when the trees have acorns, when they have flowers or even when certain birds are in town and when they're not.”Īnd there are a lot of people interested in what Odell is paying attention to. That she’s all about using the iNaturalist app on her phone to identify plants. But if you ask the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy what has her attention right now she will tell you she’s reading a lot about time.

How does dropbox work even offline