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Nothing Good Grows in an Echo Chamber
Or how I started moving away from social media platforms and began noticing trees
I have been reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell lately, which is not really about what the title implies but opting out of the algorithms that orient us toward standardization and place us in like-minded bubbles, echo chambers of surround sound. It is, in my opinion, a flawed book but I do appreciate how it encourages readers to leave their comfort zones, invest in their real communities (as opposed spending so much precious time on social media platforms, which want to streamline us for marketing purposes) and cultivate curiosity and interest in the world around us, ideally that which is closest to us.
This is not groundbreaking stuff. We know that living our lives on these platforms, which prod us into becoming more and more narrow brands of ourselves, is unhealthy, is literally sickening. Many people reading this would have grown up without social media, without cell phones, without home computers, without the internet, and we remember what it was like to be more a part of the broader natural world, our blocks and neighborhoods. We remember knowing which were the best trees for climbing, the weeds with sharp edges that stung, the way it felt with the first birdsongs of spring, the…
