Richard A. Lanham, author of The Economics of Attention
Stuff. It’s all around us. What you’re using now to read these words is “stuff.” I even used “stuff” to write these words. In a society like ours that is so focused on the material, it is impossible to avoid it. We find ourselves almost drowning in it, and yet, there seems to be something emerging that is even more vital but more overwhelming than the “stuff:” information.
In his book The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, Richard A. Lanham discusses how our society has moved from one of material objects to one of information. As an expert, author, and professor of rhetoric, Lanham suggests that we need to take an economic approach to make sense of all the information available to us, meaning that we need to use our attention to decipher this information.
This is very true in terms of the Internet and social media. The Internet gives us so much information that we become overwhelmed and distracted. There are probably many other sites and advertisements on the Internet right now calling your attention. But which one will persuade you to read what it is saying?
Even if you do click on that site and read what is there, there is no such thing as “clean” information, especially on the Internet. All the information that is presented to us portrays some kind of emotion. As Lanham describes, we must learn how to filter that unclean information, and one of the oldest ways of doing so is going back to the classic version of communicating information, rhetoric.
In The Economics of Attention, Lanham explains the connection between the age-old rhetorical persuasion and the new information age attention, saying that there is a significant similarity:
My own way here will follow my own discipline, the history of human expression, oral and literate – “rhetoric.” It has traditionally been defined as the art of persuasion. It might as well, though, have been called the economics of attention. I argue here that, in a society where information and stuff have changed places, it proves useful to think of rhetoric precisely as such, as a new economics. How could it be otherwise? If information is now our basic “stuff,” must not our thinking about human communication become economic thinking? (Lanham 21)
For classic Grecian and Roman orators, rhetoric was about voice, memory, delivery, and of course, content. You had to appeal to your audiences’ emotions and logic to persuade them. Nowadays, and sadly to say, any information can persuade us. It doesn’t need an orator with a reputation for good logic, or to be memorized, or to even be delivered well in a speech. All it needs now is a good design.
Examples of popular social media sites that give us many different kinds of information.
As Lanham states, “’Design’ is our name for the interface where stuff meets fluff. The design of a product invites us to attend to it in a particular way, to pay a certain type of attention to it. Design tells us not about the stuff per se but what we think about stuff” (Lanham 18). This is exactly how we perceive information on the Internet as well. How something, whether a product or an Internet advertisement, is designed tells us how to think and act in the world.
Many people today will read or see anything and be persuaded of its truthfulness, whether or not they have been warned “not to believe everything you read on the Internet.” Have we lost the ability to filter the information we receive and decide what is true? Can we be persuaded by just anything now, including the colorful, exciting ads on the Internet or the absurd stories on the pages of shady news sites? Lanham has called us to think economically and to use our attention to decipher all the information that is thrown at us.