The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of InformationUniversity of Chicago Press, 2006 M04 21 - 312 pages 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. |
Contents
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Other editions - View all
The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information Richard A. Lanham No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
A. E. Housman alphabetic notation Andy Andy Warhol argued argument artistic attention economy attention structures Author Barbie Barbie's become behavior Bletchley Park Boffin Pundit Café Voltaire called central chapter Christo Christo and Jeanne-Claude Claes Oldenburg communication competition complex computer graphics created cultural conversation Dada David Nimmer Dead Sea Scrolls digital expression dynamic economics of attention economists electronic Figure fluff FOOTNOTE fundamental Greek Hayek Ibid images intellectual Internet kinds letters literary live look Mattel means mind motive move Nimmer nomics oral oscillation paintings pattern poems printed Professor prose Qimron reader revisionist thinking rhetoric screen self-consciousness social society spectrum story style and substance stylistic teach Teacher of Righteousness theory things think about stuff thought three-dimensional tion trying visual Warhol Whodini words writing
References to this book
Global Journalism Research: Theories, Methods, Findings, Future Martin Löffelholz,David Weaver No preview available - 2008 |