The Changing World and How it is Based on Attention

Anyone who has conversed with a grandparent, old friend, or individual who lived a long time before this day and age can get a feeling that their lives were quite different than ours. I have been lucky enough to have been able to live with my grandma while I was growing up. Countless afternoon I would sit with her, playing cards or baking, and discuss with her about society today and how it is something that she could have never imagined. The ability to examine the past and find patterns and themes that help explain how we got from there to here is an important step in understanding how advances in technology, society, and human thought are going to influence what the future is like for us.

Richard A. Lanham does a suffient job in describing the “age of information” that we live in now. In chapter one of his book, “The Economic of Attention”, he accurately relates life today to the rapidly growing technological society we live in today. He explains that this is the first time in histroy that people have been able to purchase such a vast array of material goods through the internet instead of going out to a store and buying them themseleves. In addition, Lanham writes that many people beleive that acquiring these goods is the goonly way for them to find happiness. I beleive that it would be hard for somebody living in the world today to argue with these statements. We are constantly bombared with subliminal advertising, new trends, and updated technology that infleunces who we are and what we strive to do in our lives.

Another interesting point that Lanham make regards how globalized we are. He talks about how tourisim is a plagued idea based on the what it is in general. Everyone wants to go out and explore interesting places around the world, that is the basis behind tourism, but as tourism and traveling has increased it becomes more and more a “self destructive buisness.” Once a location is discoverd and overun by tourists, noone wants to go there anymore and it seems to be “ruined.” Lanham converts this idea into how physical locations have began to disappear because of how little time it takes to travel or communicate to other people living in distant places around the world. All these transformations that are occuring around us have began to change the dynamic of what we want to have in our lives. The material “stuff” that we have always seemed to impact our desires is now shifting into information. Lanham says, “when you interpret nature as information, stuff and fluff change places.”

The world is changing into a place that is so vastly interconnected, that although material things and brands are still valued highly, information is becoming the hot new thing that is evolving. Lanham describes this idea using building airplanes as an expample:

“In this world, every element has been created from specific information keyboarded by master illusionists. Made objects, from building airplanes, find their beginning and and central reality in computer assisted design and manufacture. The life-giving act inheres in designing the object on a digital screen. The manufacture or “printout” of the object becomes a derivative function performed slave-like by a computer-controlled machine.”

 

People have always tried to do things that are able to keep their attention. If someone is not interested in what they are doing, what they are watching, or who they are interacting with, then they will not fully put themsleves into the situation in which they exist in. Lanham talks about human nautre saying, “We might think of this inherited set of adaptive patterns, of behavioral inclanations, as the attention capital of humankind. It represents the stroed-up impulse to pay attention to certain kinds of thinks in certain kinds of ways.” In his opinion, this new age of information is coincides with the way humans are designed to be. We love to be constantly entertained or interested, and by allowing humans to have access to an astronomical amount of information we have little trouble not finding something that will catch our attention. As Lanham puts it, “The World Wide Web is now a document billions of pages long.”

In my opinion, Lanham does a very good job describing the world today and the direction in which we are headed. Everyday people live their lives without realizing how different of a world we live in today than we did even two decades ago. If your mind is able to travel even farther back in history, the gap that separtes the similarities between these two times becomes increasingly distinct. After reading an article that describes future techonologies that will change the world, it is easy to see how these changes to society are only going to increase at an exponential rate. This article talks about nanotechonology. In a world of ever increasing information, communication, and knowledge, we are soon going to be able to make things on such a small scale, that it will be able to interact with the microscopic organisms that live within our body.

These are changes everyone is going to have to realize and understand. Failure to do so will lead to ignorance of the world we live in, but will also obstruct opions from forming that could help change the direction of today’s society. A last point to be made has to do with Lanham’s opinion on rhetoric. Although it is quite pessimistic, it is a truth that will continue if not changed by inteligent individuals living today:

“”Rhetroic” has not always beena dirty word, the opposites of sincerity, truth, and good intentions. For most of its life it meant the training in expresssion, spoken and written, that you need to play a useful role in human soceity. It became a dirty word in the seventeenth centruy, when science, trying to describe the world of stuff, wanted to aboloish the distortions of human attention structures”