December 2006    

The Economics of Attentions: Style and Substance in the Age of Information Author: Richard A. Lanham Publisher: University of Chicago Press $29.00 Cloth (312 p.) ISBN: 0226468828 B&T         YBP Reviewed by Walt Crawford "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." So begins the jacket blurb for this new book from Richard Lanham, a professor emeritus of English at UCLA. The blurb goes on to say that Lanham "traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention…with all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics." We learn that the "new set of moguls" in the business world will be "new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts." With a buildup like that, I'd expect three things from the book: that it keep my attention through interesting writing and a compelling narrative line, that it make a solid case that our economy no longer depends on "things and objects," and that it convince me that librarians and other humanities types really do stand to inherit the earth, or at least the big bucks. It does none of those things. Some of the writing shows verve; most does not. Lanham admits to (or takes pride in) lacking mathematics and having no real sense of traditional economics. He fails to make a case that stuff no longer matters; it's hard to do that without math. I can assure him that, except for a minority of privileged people, the economics of food, medicine, shelter, and transportation still matter very much. Finally, I don't believe he makes a serious effort to show that these "new masters of attention" will come from the liberal arts and become the "new moguls," lovely as I might find that notion. I see little or nothing in the text to support that case. Lanham assures us that "When our children come home and tell us that they have decided to major in English or art history, no longer need we tremble for their economic future." But even in the portion of the economy that does depend on attention, the filtering agents won't necessarily (or likely) be highly-paid humanists. Based on current trends, they're more likely to be the algorithm builders at Yahoo!/Google/Ask/Windows Live and the ranks of unpaid reviewers who make collaborative ranking engines (e.g., Amazon and Netflix) work. The founders of Google did not major in art history and I don't believe Yahoo! employs thousands of English majors. This is not so much a book as a collection of independent chapters (some from aging articles), some more connected than others. Lanham splits each chapter into primary text and "background conversations," long sections in a different typeface described by Lanham in his preface: "[A]s an experiment, I have chosen to chronicle my pursuit in a more informal, hypertextual way, as a supplement to the main argument of each chapter. In these background conversations, I'll describe some of the places I'm coming from and where you might go if you want to continue the conversation." He claims this experiment will not be respectable to scholars, "but it may be useful to the ordinary reader, in whose existence I continue to believe." As one such ordinary reader, I found the sections distracting, baffling, and ultimately factors in making a choppy book even harder to follow. Lanham's preface offers an "easy way to think about this book." That "easy way" may indicate the difficulties that lie ahead: "it is a series of variations on a theme and that theme is a rhetorical figure." He goes on to say the figure itself is "dead simple." As nearly as I can extract that "dead simplicity" from what follows, that theme is "oscillatio": "We alternately participate in the world and step back and reflect on how we attend to it." Still with me? If you think this is all easy and clear, you may enjoy this book. Here's the economics of attention in practice: had I not promised Bob Nardini that I'd write this review, I would have closed this book before the end of Chapter Two-maybe before the end of the preface--never to open it again. I'm an avid reader, but I found this a remarkably easy book to close and a hard one to reopen. I should love this book. My college degree is in rhetoric and rhetoric is at the heart of this book. Had I been a better scholar, I might have become a professor, teaching rhetoric and writing books based on rhetorical figures. But I was also a math minor and recognize that it's futile to discuss economic shifts without understanding the mathematics of the real world. Probably a must buy for most academic institutions, but don't expect loads of enlightenment. Published by YBP Library Services 999 Maple St., Contoocook, NH 03229 USA v: 800.258.3774   f: 603.746.5628 w: www.ybp.com   e: academia@ybp.com All rights reserved.