The Perils of Persuasive Design on Facebook

Odell, Jenny. “Exercises in Attention.” How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Melville House, , pp. 114-126.

Odell writes a somewhat sprawling personal narrative that starts off as a response to a passage in Time Well Spent by James Williams, but that then diverts into a response to a Master’s thesis by Devangi Vivrekar on persuasvie design. The point that Odell aims to make is not that we need to learn to live with persuasive design and recognize (and accept) that the persuasive designers are just far more advanced and far smarter and far superior than all of us (and so we should learn to live with them), but rather than we ought to try to learn self-control and realize that there is a real world and a real reality outside the control of the persuasive designers, i.e., nature—that we can all recognize and appreciate and come to live in and be part of. To arrive at that conclusion, Odell takes a somewhat long trip down recent memory lane, describing her different experiences over the past few years: “I first learned about James Williams from a recent Stanford master’s thesis by Devangi Vivrekar...” (114) and “Just a day before reading Vivrekar’s thesis, I had seen the film Blindspotting...” (118) and “A year and a half ago I came across an aerial map of Rancho Rinconada...” (123) and “Last year I told my friend Josh about (re)noticing Calabazas Creek. He lives in Oakland but had grown up, near me, in Sunnyvale...” (124). Eventually it arrives at the conclusion, which is this: “Realities are, after all, inhabitable. If we can render a new reality together—with attention—perhaps we can meet each other there” (126). In other words, do not work with the attention economy but fight against it; regain control of your attention and direct it where you want it to go.