The Economics of Attention
Style and Substance in the Age of Information
- Author: Richard A. Lanham
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press
- ISBN: 0226468828
- Category: Business & Economics
- Page: 312
- View: 7150
The economics of attention: Style and substance in the age of information - by Richard A.
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If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts. Lanham’s The Electronic Word was one of the earliest and most influential books on new electronic culture. The Economics of Attention builds on the best insights of that seminal book to map the new frontier that information technologies have created.
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The expression “attention economy” has achieved in recent years a certain degree of popularity in discussions about the present state of communication media. It is based on a simple idea: If economics is the allocation of scarce resources, then we are not living in an information economy because “information is not in short supply in the new information economy … What we lack is the human attention needed to make sense of it all” (p. xi). We are, therefore, living in an attention economy. This formulation is appealing on at least two levels. On a personal level, it resonates with our daily life experiences in a media-saturated world. On a more academic level, the attention economy seems like a promising alternative approach to the analysis of media economics. Additionally, with new media providing the apex of information overload and attention shortage, this approach seems even...
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