Economics of Attention

Book: The Economics of Attention by Richard A Lanham. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006

Review

By Pat Kane:

"The "attention economy" isn't a new idea - it's been flitting around the pages of techno-capitalist magazines like Wired for nearly ten years now. But Lanham's take is unusual. He is as deeply immersed in arts and letters as he is in bytes and chips. An emeritus professor of literature, he previously published The Electronic Word, which anticipated those surprising synergies between digital and literary culture more than a decade ago.

His agenda is familiar enough. Modern capitalism succeeds by the promotion of brands as much as by the delivery of products and services: we're buying narrative and symbolism with our mobiles or cars, as well as functionality. Or, as Lanham puts it a little too winsomely, we invest in "fluff" (the attention we pay to things) as much as in "stuff" (the things).

But he wants to argue that it was ever thus, using all the classicism and humanism at his disposal. When Plato expresses distrust of poets and the sophists, he begins a tradition which extends all the way to Naomi Klein and the anti-advertising instincts of the happiness gurus. The need to persuade, seduce and command attention - in short, the arts of rhetoric - have always been suspected by the powerful, claims Lanham. Those who want their authority to be based on a stable interpretation of reality will be suspicious of those who mess that up, who allow style and substance to intermingle." (http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article1174213.ece)