{"id":57,"date":"2013-01-24T21:40:51","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T05:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/?p=57"},"modified":"2013-01-24T21:40:51","modified_gmt":"2013-01-25T05:40:51","slug":"a-black-hole-of-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/2013\/01\/24\/a-black-hole-of-information\/","title":{"rendered":"A Black Hole of Information"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"int_lanham\"<\/a>

Richard A. Lanham, author of The Economics of Attention<\/p><\/div>\n

Stuff. It\u2019s all around us.\u00a0 What you\u2019re using now to read these words is \u201cstuff.\u201d\u00a0 I even used \u201cstuff\u201d to write these words.\u00a0 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 \u201cstuff:\u201d information.<\/p>\n

In his book The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information<\/i><\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

This is very true in terms of the Internet and social media.\u00a0 The Internet gives us so much information that we become overwhelmed and distracted.\u00a0 There are probably many other sites and advertisements on the Internet right now calling your attention.\u00a0 But which one will persuade you to read what it is saying?<\/p>\n

Even if you do click on that site and read what is there, there is no such thing as \u201cclean\u201d information, especially on the Internet.\u00a0 All the information that is presented to us portrays some kind of emotion.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In The Economics of Attention, <\/i>Lanham explains the connection between the age-old rhetorical persuasion and the new information age attention, saying that there is a significant similarity:<\/p>\n

My own way here will follow my own discipline, the history of human expression, oral and literate \u2013 \u201crhetoric.\u201d\u00a0 It has traditionally been defined as the art of persuasion. It might as well, though, have been called the economics of attention.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 How could it be otherwise? If information is now our basic \u201cstuff,\u201d must not our thinking about human communication become economic thinking? (Lanham 21)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For classic Grecian and Roman orators, rhetoric was about voice, memory, delivery, and of course, content. You had to appeal to your audiences\u2019 emotions and logic to persuade them.\u00a0 Nowadays, and sadly to say, any information can persuade us.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t need an orator with a reputation for good logic, or to be memorized, or to even be delivered well in a speech.\u00a0 All it needs now is a good design.<\/p>\n

\"Unknown\"<\/a>

Examples of popular social media sites that give us many different kinds of information.<\/p><\/div>\n

As Lanham states, \u201c\u2019Design\u2019 is our name for the interface where stuff meets fluff.\u00a0 The design of a product invites us to attend to it in a particular way, to pay a certain type of attention to it.\u00a0 Design tells us not about the stuff per se but what we think about stuff\u201d (Lanham 18).\u00a0 This is exactly how we perceive information on the Internet as well.\u00a0 How something, whether a product or an Internet advertisement, is designed tells us how to think and act in the world.<\/p>\n

Many people today will read or see anything and be persuaded of its truthfulness, whether or not they have been warned \u201cnot to believe everything you read on the Internet.\u201d\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Lanham has called us to think economically and to use our attention to decipher all the information that is thrown at us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stuff. It\u2019s all around us.\u00a0 What you\u2019re using now to read these words is \u201cstuff.\u201d\u00a0 I even used \u201cstuff\u201d to write these words.\u00a0 In a society like ours that is so focused on the material, it is impossible to avoid … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":378,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","kk_blocks_editor_width":"","_kiokenblocks_attr":"","_kiokenblocks_dimensions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"gutentor_comment":1,"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"anapecoraro","author_link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/author\/anapecoraro\/"},"qubely_comment":1,"qubely_category":"Uncategorized<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Stuff. It\u2019s all around us.\u00a0 What you\u2019re using now to read these words is \u201cstuff.\u201d\u00a0 I even used \u201cstuff\u201d to write these words.\u00a0 In a society like ours that is so focused on the material, it is impossible to avoid … Continue reading →","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/378"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}