The onset of the Digital Age has dramatically altered our perception of the material and immaterial. For the first time in human history, we have placed a greater premium on ideas and information over what scholar Richard A. Lanham simply refers to as “stuff.” This paradigm shift has largely replaced the norms of the Industrial Age: an age characterized by factories and production. In his book The Economics of Attention, Richard A. Lanham observes this shift and discusses the impacts and implications it has on modern society.
Throughout the first chapter of his book, Lanham discusses the differences between ‘stuff’ and ‘fluff’. Stuff refers to material items while fluff includes thoughts, ideas, raw data, and information. In our waking lives we are constantly bombarded by information. Our brains cannot possibly process the sheer amount of data that we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Our attention spans can help us scale down the data that we perceive. It acts as a sort of filter.
Elmer Wheeler
Lanham discusses that our attention spans are easily susceptible to the “centripetal attention structures” created by the media and company advertisements. Even though we are largely obsessed with the stuff portrayed in commercials, a key point that Lanham raises is that it’s all of the fluff surrounding it that entices us to it in the first place. To draw from legendary American salesman, Elmer Wheeler, you do much better by selling the sounds and smells of cooking a hotdog instead of selling the hotdog itself. In other words, you ‘sell the sizzle‘ because otherwise you are just selling dead pig.
While sounds and smells of hotdogs cooking on a grill may stimulate our senses enough to get us to buy the hotdog, companies have gone a step further to compete for our attention. Lanham discusses that companies place more effort into the fluff surrounding their product than they do to the product itself. He points towards the manufacturing of cars as a prime example. In that market, design is everything. It doesn’t matter that the combustible engine has largely remained unchanged from the time it was invented. If you hire a good enough graphic designer, the car will sell based on its style as opposed to its substance.
“Design” is our name for the interface where stuff meets fluff. The design of a product invites us to attend to it in a particularway, to pay a certain type of attention to it. Design tells us not about stuff per se but what we think about stuff.
The shift to into the Digital Age (or the Information Age) from the Industrial Age has been largely responsible for the dramatic shift in our economy. The United States transitioned from factory-based, industrial production to specializing in intelligence and information distribution. Now, the major jobs are created in the service sector – not in the assembly line. It is the reason why places like Detroit and the rust belt have crumbled and the Silicon Valley have boomed.
The toggling between stuff and fluff is what the economy of attention rests upon. Lanham provides many examples of this oscillation between reality and our ability to perceive it. Artists in general toggle between the world of stuff and fluff. Digital artists use data (fluff) in the form of algorithms to make their artwork (stuff). “You see the ‘information’ in the image, the mathematics that inheres the image.” Paradoxically, the fluff becomes the stuff. Another example he gave was playing video games. You process the information in the world of the game while you simultaneously control what goes on from your controller.
“Net of Being” is a piece by visual artist, Alex Grey. Grey used a logarithm to create the ornate spiral patterns featured in the painting. Plus, I like Tool.
A liberal education matters in a world of fluff.
Rhetoric, according to Lanham, acts as a filtration system for the information we process. While rhetoric was first used in ancient Greece to argue cases, its modern context may enable us to better differentiate the blurred lines between stuff and fluff. However, he uses the term “stylistic filtration” which carries with it the implication that the filter can be morphed by ideals and societal norms. Since culture is our operating system, by extension, this even applies to how we question the material we are presented. This is where a liberal education may prove invaluable. Lanham argues that it “creates attention structures to teach us how to attend to the world, [and] must be central to acting in the world as well as to contemplating it.” In other words, avoid taking things at face value because if Lanham taught us anything, it’s probably just fluff.
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