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).

The arguments in Chapter 3, "What's Next for Text," a version of a published article, and Chapter 4, "An Alphabet That Thinks," will be somewhat familiar to readers of Lanham's earlier work, The Electronic Word. But they are enhanced here in a discussion of type and style as attention structures. Lanham contrasts the possibility of linear print text with digital expression in which text, images, motion, and sound can all be generated by the same digital code. Digital expression greatly enhances the choices one can make about how to express information and fosters heightened stylistic self-consciousness, "the habit of looking at an expressive surface as well as through it" (p. 143). Letters can become stuff, as artists like Jenny Holzer have demonstrated; one can see the back side of an A. Metaphors about orientation in an argument can become literal in text as text can move in various diagrammatic arrangements. In a stuff economy based on the exchange of goods, what Lanham characterizes as a CBS (clarity-brevity-sincerity) approach to expression may work. But a new rhetoric is needed for the attention economy, one that brings in the three-dimensional world of behavior and social relationships, one more based on oral culture.

That new rhetoric Lanham proposes at length in Chapter 5, "Style/ Substance Matrix," the title of the chapter reflecting the core toggle of the entire book. It's a clever discussion, like the rest of the text. To examine how we make judgments about style and substance and thus "originate change," he proposes a set of spectra along four dimensions: signal, perceiver, motive, and life. The signal, the means of expression (words, images, motion, sound), is plotted from through (transparency) to at (self-conscious artfulness). The second spectrum, which also runs from through to at, "plots the perceiver, not the signal perceived" (p. 163). As Lanham notes, "Some people endure difficult lives by learning to look at them, consider them as dramas to which they have a free ticket" (p. 163). Business seminars, too, aim to encourage participants to step outside their daily tasks to self-consciously observe them. Crossing media--making numbers visual, for example--aids understanding. "Motive" can be plotted from game through purpose to play. Lanham quotes Eric Hoffer: "A vigorous society is a society that has set its heart on toys" (p. 166). On the game end is the competitive motivation that leads one to look through an activity to success and money; on the play end is amateur, stylized performance. Management is in the middle trying to balance the entrepreneurial spirit of the game with the playful spirit of the inventor. The "life" dimension takes reality as a variable, the one to which all others refer. Lanham notes that much of Western intellectual history considers reality fixed and not variable. But he suggests thinking of life as theater (there is precedent for that) and essentially self-conscious. In the life spectrum, then, we plot life as information against life as drama, with a midpoint of life as stuff (p. 177).

The last chapter, "Revisionist Thinking," makes a final push toward more attention to rhetoric in our educational system and toward helping us balance and continually readjust between at and through, between attention paid to the expressive surface and attention to the substance on the other side. Digital technology fosters and energizes such thinking. To deal with an explosion of information we need filters, and one of the most important filters is style. Design is the interface between stuff and fluff, the filter, for example, in the heads-up displays of maps and the visualizations in which we seem to fly over a landscape of information. Writing this review has been something of an at/through experience in itself. As the ample quotations probably attest, the writing here is dazzling, especially at the level of the well-turned sentence. If you are likely to read aloud to others when you read, you'll find yourself doing a lot of reading aloud. On the through side, at times those loose and baggy categories of contending opposites seem to be a bit too shifty and their labels a bit too unsticky. In saying we need to toggle, and that the turnabout of opposites is indeed confusing, Lanham covers his tracks. He also at times seems to be impish, or outrageous, just to provoke reaction. But for my money, he presents a much more understandable explanation of themes currently proposed by cultural theorists than most of them do, including the concept of a community of writers and readers, of life and politics as dramatic ("performativity"), of writing's role in good citizenship, and of the need for self-conscious expression beyond a simple CBS rubric.

Readers may find places in Lanham's discussion that don't bear up to extended scrutiny. I'm also troubled by the omission, as far as I can tell, of a source of the term "economy of attention" that led me to use the concept long before I read Lanham. That's Michael Goldhaber, who used it in Web postings at least as far back as 1996. This omission seems particularly troubling in a book that talks a good deal about copyright, especially the role of copyright in a digital environment to protect expression, if not ideas.

That said, Lanham's bibliography is extensive and his breadth of multidisciplinary understanding sort of breathtaking. He takes us through most of the movers and shakers in Western history and literature along with side visits to economists, scientists, and business gurus. I've been under the spell of this book for weeks, talking with friends about its arguments, seeing examples of toggling wherever I go. The text can be repetitive, slippery, idiosyncratic, and arch. But it is a story so well told, so richly evocative, that anyone who wants to understand how digital technology has changed the landscape has to drop in.

Deborah C. Andrews

University of Delaware