The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information.

The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, by Richard A. Lanham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 312 pp.

This is a clever, witty, and engaging--if at times frustrating--book. The central thesis is that in our information age, made possible by digital technology, the scarce commodity to be allocated (and thus a matter of economics) is not "stuff," broadly defined as what you can kick or the information based on such stuff (also, stuff). We're drowning in stuff. Instead, it's attention that's scarce, and allocating attention is a matter of style, of rhetoric.

That makes sense. What becomes more complicated is Lanham's further development of distinctions between stuff and nonstuff (called "fluff," for ease and wit). Those distinctions are not fixed but can "change places in a wink" (p. 157). The pattern of thought necessary to pay and draw attention in the digital world is toggling, oscillating between descriptions of the world and what we think about the world. Sometimes we look "through": We see transparently to the substance. Sometimes we look "at": We are drawn to self-conscious, dramatic style and expression. Sometimes style is substance and sometimes not. Lanham explains, "ff you are a car designer, for you the style of the car will be the substance. If you are a philosopher, 'what you think about things' will be the 'things' of your world" (p. 157). "Revisionist thinking"--seeing and then seeing again, toggling between "contending opposites"--is at the heart of creativity and innovation (p. 254).

In eight chapters, Lanham elaborates on this at/through toggle--a "rhythm of attention" he says has been overlooked as a figure of speech; he names it oscillatio (p. xii). He suggests a new theory of digital expression and notation, discusses changes in the educational system needed to incorporate such new thinking, and shows how digital technology fosters new concepts of property. Three of the chapters are reprints (or versions of earlier work). One, on copyright, is a stretch in this context, although Lanham ties it in with a headnote. Another, "The Audit of Virtuality," on how virtual universities provide a critique of 4-year, campus-based ones, seems dated (it's from 2002) and a bit off track. The other, "What's Next for Text" (Chapter 3), is more appropriate. These chapters, along with new ones, do, however, contribute to the sense of this work as an intellectual memoir of someone who reads widely and well, connects those readings in unexpected ways, and takes pleasure in a good turn of phrase.

Toggling is both the substance of the book and, fittingly, its organizational pattern. Each chapter is divided into two sections: an opening essay and "Background Conversations" in which Lanham guides us through his readings. To aid the "ordinary reader," he avoids the intrusion of references and prints all notes at the end, keyed to the text by page number and partial repetition of the passages cited. Given Lanham's interest in design, it's appropriate, too, that the book is handsomely designed, within the limits of the printed page ("an economy of deprival" as opposed to the screen, which provides an "economics of plenty" [p. 20]), and uses visuals and typography effectively.

The first chapter, "Stuff and Fluff," sets up the book's central pairings and economic conceit. It is breathtaking in its sweep of examples and definitions. One example is tourism, the "biggest business in the world." As people increasingly collect consumer goods to express their personalities and collect travel destinations, those items and locations lose their significance as stuff. He argues that "tourism, invented to restore our naive wonder at strange places, destroys them instead" and that "physicality" doesn't matter where "information has annihilated distance" (p. 2).

Here's a sample of his redefinitions of key economic concepts for the attention economy. In a stuff economy, capital is a "sequestration of current resources for future use" (p. 8), a bank account or stockpiled inventory in the stuff economy. In the attention economy, it is the "cultural conversation" (his "Background Conversations" in each chapter may provide a look at what he means). It is some "inherited set of adaptive patterns, of behavioral inclinations" of "the literary and artistic imagination" (p. 9). Productivity is "theatrical self-awareness" (p. 10). To get to that definition, he refers to the Hawthorne Experiment, which showed worker productivity improved when workers knew they were observed. "When we are observed in our work, we socialize it. We share it with the observer and by doing so it becomes more real. Because more real, it becomes more worth attending to, more interesting. And so you do better work" (p. 10). Excess profits in a capitalist economy are matched by celebrity, "gross inequities in attention" in a "winner-take-all" society (p. 11). Property in the stuff economy can have only one owner. Moreover, it can be used up when shared, a condition Garrett Hardin memorably noted in his essay "Tragedy of the Commons." Using common ground in a village for grazing sheep uses it up. Lanham argues for a new theory of the "comedy of the commons" created by the Web. In the digital economy, the commons becomes

an ever-richer community resource. The more people graze on it for

their own purposes, the bigger it becomes.... It thus combines the

power of a free market, where individual gain leads to collective

benefit, with the cooperative ownership of the cultural

conversation. (p. 13)

For universities, traditionally creators and repositories of knowledge, the shift to an attention economy means that the arts and letters, which teach how to "attend to the world" (p. 14), trade places with engineering and sciences as modes of formal inquiry: "The design of an object ... becomes as important as the engineering of the object. The 'positioning in the market' of an object, a version of applied drama, will be as important as either one" (p. 14). Visual artists are the new economists. For them, the "locus of art" has become not the object but the response, the "attention it required" (p. 15). He claims that "design school, perhaps combined with library school, may be a better preparation for the felt realities of current business life than the MBA mills dedicated to the economics of stuff. Or, perhaps even better, a degree in the history of drama" (p. 19).

In the second chapter, "Economists of Attention," Lanham provides a toggling history of art, romping through Marcel Duchamp, the Italian futurists, and pop artists, all of whom needed "an interpretive Bureaucracy of Attention Economists"--critics and theorists--to show that the surface was the meaning (p. 50). He dwells at length on Andy Warhol and Christo. Warhol trades on his celebrity to build "attention traps," placing common items such as soup cans in a new attention structure. His art draws inspiration from the audience, not the muse; is trendy rather than timeless; and aims at "repetition not rarity" (p. 54). Artists like Warhol "pursue your twin hungers: for the spotlight and for collecting stuff, knowing that each needs the other to make it real" (p. 53). More in the masterpiece tradition of art is the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who most recently carried out The Gates project in Central Park, New York. In a long discussion of their Running Fence in California in 1976, Lanham argues that one purpose of the project was beauty, but the real art was the human behavior needed to create it, persuasion through "hearings, lawsuits, rulings, reports ..." (p. 57); the coordination of the volunteers who did the actual building; and thus the creation of a participatory drama. Christo is also an entrepreneur of art who finances his own projects "by reinventing the joint-stock corporation on a medieval attention model" (p. 61). The short duration of their projects (The Gates lasted 2 weeks) reinforces the concept that art is an attention structure rather than a physical object--fluff, not stuff. Warhol and Christo represent, according to Lanham, two approaches. Warhol is an opportunist, seeking money and celebrity, "a creature of the social surface" (p. 63). Christo, on the other hand, is a serious planner, an artistic entrepreneur, and a "responsible bill payer" (p. 63). Lanham concludes, "They were both rhetoricians, economists of attention. Rhetoric has always ... seemed to divide into two parties: those who created attention structures to form and strengthen social purposes and those who sought only to serve themselves" (p. 63).