In the first chapter of The Economics of Attention, Richard A. Lanham’s begins by acknowledging that we are now facing more information then we can process. And that companies are no longer making products to last, rather they are more focused on making a relationship with a loyal consumer. And that as a consumer we are no longer looking for things of quality. Lanham stresses this in the very beginning by highlighting the new relationship between the product and the consumer.

Products used to be designed to last a lifetime. Now they have a shorter life than young love. For computers, it is three steps from cutting-edge to doorstop. It is the relationship to the consumer that matters now, not the object that engenders it, or the database that such relationships generate that generates value, or the associations that can be built on such relationships, or the brand, the box it comes in. So enamored of brands have we become that we walk around plastered with sponsor decals like a race car. The clothes, the stuff, have become an excuse to display our brand loyalties, what we think about stuff.

Furthermore, he begins to talk about this new age of information. He talks about how nowadays we are bombarded by more information each year then we can process. Lanham then begins to talk about the economy and how all this stuff has changed the ages or stages of it. The ages of economy are now defined as “agriculture, industrialism, and fluff”. Fluff as he described it by highlighting someone else’s definition is if you didn’t dug ut, grow it, or build it, then it is considered fluff; in other words if you didn’t work for the outcome of the stuff then it is fluff. However, according to Lanham all that has changed now, the definitions of stuff and fluff have switched;

Richard A. Lanham

But when you interpret nature as information, stuff and fluff change places. The “real” world becomes a printout, a printout created increasingly by computer graphics, by digital design. We see this synthetic reality everywhere nowadays, from TV commercials to scientific visualization, computer games to military training. In this world, every element has been created from specific information keyboarded by master illusionists. Made objects, from buildings to airplanes, find their beginning 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.

In other words, nowadays if the machine doesn’t produce it some how then it is fluff; that the hard work is now credited to the machines and the computers that produce all the stuff. I find this to be really sad because in a sense he is saying that we no longer give value to man made things, we no longer trust it if it isn’t mass produced.

Lanham then goes into making an interesting parallel between the definition of Economics now and than. He defines Economics than as, ” the study of how human beings allocate scarce resources to produce various commodities and how those commodities are distributed for consumption among the people in society” and he questions what is scarce resources in the Information economy? finally revealing it as the human attention needed to process all the information. This is extremely interesting because now it seems that our economy is only as strong as our attention spans, and with all the information produced each year, that our attention span can’t possibly be as strong as those of earlier times.

He references the famous economist Herbert Simon as he considered the attention-economy problem in 1971 and saw it as simply a question of filtering. Computer “knowbots;’ as we now call them, digital librarians, would organize our attention for us; our news would arrive pre-Googled and personalized. Or we would hire live special librarians to step in where Google fails.And so, at least to some degree, it has worked out. Special librarians are a growing job category. But either way, bots or bodies, the thinking remains “commodity” thinking. We have too many boxes of information arriving at our loading dock. We must find mechanized ways to organize their arrival. A UPS problem.

This is also very interesting because  he is basically saying that we can all become more efficient, however not on our own, that we need to be filtered in order to be productive. And immediately I think of how often I get distracted while working on a research project or this blog, and how the adds all along my search results are created specifically for me to do just that, distract my attention so that I feel the pressure of indulging in my distraction while also knowing I need to make a fast decision in order to get back to my “work”. This is an example of how the information economy is fighting for the commodity, that is my attention. And how when they take it upon themselves to fitler their machine filtering becomes so specific it is almost impossible to ignore. As if they know what you want and need better then you.