Richard A. Lanham, author of The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, explains how society has gone from a materialistic society to a more informative one. Lanham’s main point in his first chapter is that we are not living in an information economy, but rather in an attention economy. Today many people in society are lacking attention, for, attention is the resource needed to fully understand all the available information. Lanham characterizes the information economy by “stuff” or substance and the attention economy by “fluff” or style. Stuff and fluff have undergone a “figure/ground shift”. Style has become much more important than substance as time progresses. Both play an important role for communication in any media; however, style is what captures people’s attention. Since the internet, people have been able to access so much information and the problem is not knowing how much of it is actually trustworthy.

Attention economy is beginning to form new business techniques in advertising, media, and design. The best way to grab ones attention it through communication. Entertainment alone grabs our attention. We see this in journalists, politicians and most importantly professors.  What exactly is it that grabs our attention? The answer is rhetoric. There are various kinds of rhetoric but some work better than others. Lanham explained,

“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?”

Back then, Greek and Roman orators used rhetoric by using their memory and voice to be heard. They had to appeal their audiences and convince them that what they spoke of was true. However, today many things have changed because it takes very little to persuade somebody. It can be obtained with simply a good design. A design of a website for example can catch the viewers’ attention quickly. This is honestly very sad to realize because people can easily believe something and in the end be dissatisfied with their outcome. If society continues to carry this mentality who knows what the future has in store for us.