Quitting social media reads as class signaling and requires privilege.

Evidence

If Facebook is such a big part of the attention economy problem, then surely quitting it is an appropriate “fuck you” to the whole thing. To me, though, this is fighting the battle on the wrong plane. In her 2012 paper, “Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention,” Laura Portwood-Stacer interviews people who quit Facebook for political reasons and finds that the meaning of these isolated actions is often lost on the Facebook friends left behind. Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related. Portwood-Stacer’s interviews also show that “the personal or political decision not to participate in Facebook may be interpreted [by friends] as a social decision not to interact with them,” or worse, as “holier-than-thou internet asceticism.” Most important, the decision to leave Facebook involves its own kind of “margin”: … It may be that refusal is only available as a tactic to people who already possess a great deal of social capital, people whose social standing will endure without Facebook and people whose livelihoods don’t require them to be constantly plugged in and reachable…These are people who have what [Kathleen] Noonan (2011) calls “the power to switch off.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 328

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly supports the privilege critique the reader wants: Odell herself concedes attention refusal is not universally available.
• QUESTION: If refusal to participate requires social capital, does that undercut Odell’s own prescription for ‘doing nothing’? Worth pressing.
• XREF: connects to: The ability to reject imperfect resources is itself a class privilege. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 104