Paying attention to persistent local nonhuman life offers refuge from online hysteria.

Evidence

Without really thinking about it, I modified my path home from the bus to pass by the night herons whenever I could, just to be reassured by their presence. I remember specifically feeling comforted by the presence of these strange birds, like I could look up from the horrifying maelstrom of that day’s Twitter and they’d probably be there, unmoving with their formidable beaks and their laser-red eyes. (In fact, I even found them sitting in the same place on 2011 Google Street View, and I have no doubt they were there earlier, but Street View doesn’t go back any further.) The KFC is near Lake Merritt, a man-made lake in a completely developed area that, like much of the East Bay and the Peninsula, used to be the type of wetlands that herons and other shorebirds love. Night herons have existed here since before Oakland was a city, holdovers from that marshier time. Knowing this made the KFC night herons begin to seem like ghosts to me, especially at night when the streetlights would make their white bellies glow from below. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 98

Categorization

• XREF: This is the germ of what she later expands into bioregionalism/Deep Listening method; connects directly to the ‘attention as world-constitution’ frame the reader is tracking. — connects to: Intense attention can become immobilizing and bring one out of step with everyday life; Early online communities aimed to augment local place, not escape it — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 131; Digital media isolate people from contrary opinion which face-to-face life once forced — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 118 (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Intense attention can become immobilizing and bring one out of step with everyday life; Early online communities aimed to augment local place, not escape it — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 131; Digital media isolate people from contrary opinion which face-to-face life once forced — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 118 (+1 more)