Back in June, I posted here a review of sorts of Richard Lanham’s The Economics of
Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, and in the
volley of ensuing commentary between Ruchira and me I mentioned works by
another author, Michael H. Goldhaber, who has been writing for roughly two
decades about what he calls the “economics of attention.” Goldhaber has now published his
review of Lanham’s book in the November issue of First Monday, so I’d like
to revisit the topic by reviewing Goldhaber’s review. (And if Ruchira thought Prof. Kuspit’s
remarks about Edward Hopper’s paintings
were redundant, she’s really going to wonder what’s going on here.)
Despite his laudatory opening paragraph, Goldhaber is mostly
disappointed with Lanham’s new work. I
enjoyed the book, yet I also think Goldhaber has many fair criticisms…as well
as many unfair ones. Nevertheless, I
share a number of his concerns. For
example, I certainly appreciate Goldhaber’s aside regarding the “highly
misleading” and confusing use of the term “information” to refer variously
to a component of knowledge or a bit or transaction of data. Like Golhaber, I am wary of the rigors of
economics, an opinion which in my case may simply be a function of
ignorance. Nevertheless, I tend to side
with Lanham, whose point in writing The Economics of Attention
is to identify economics as a species of rhetoric.
Goldhaber will have nothing to do with such a thesis. Instead, he is mildly fixated on the need to
tweak economic methods and practices—even the very so-called universal laws that
define the discipline—to account for the new form of currency it now should
measure. He holds that the reason for
the current acceleration in production of information we are
witnessing—“information” in the sense of floods of bits—is that “attention is
very desirable, in almost endless amounts, at least to some people,” and that
this newfangled breed of information is how one obtains it. (Lanham, on the other hand, views attention
as a commodity one seeks to allow one to rise above the flood, to achieve
salience.) Goldhaber is very likely
himself one of the people who finds attention very desirable, as he devotes
more than a paragraph to a demonstration that he is likely the first to have
come up with the eponymous topic he shares with Lanham and others. The attention one commands by virtue of being
the first to have done such-and-such is substantial, independent of the
intrinsic value of such-and-such. (For
an alternative take on the virtues of innovation, see this opinion piece,
a tepid reflection on the significance of the automobile in American history.)
The crux of Goldhaber’s criticism of Lanham is an instance
of the incommensurability of the famous two cultures, the hard sciences and the
soft arts, including the language arts, which happens to be Lanham’s area of
expertise. Goldhaber’s is theoretical
physics. Aptly, the disconnection between the
two is reflected in Lanham’s marking of the shift to an attention economy
as one from a focus on “stuff” to “fluff” or, less cleverly, substance to
style. Goldhaber has only a mild appreciation
for style, that refinement of fluff toward which Lanham urges the application
of the attention economist’s rhetorical tools. For instance, Goldhaber asks skeptically, “[A]re the devices that draw
us…to a Bach cantata, a Sharapova tennis match, a Pollock painting, a
Kubrick movie, a Wittgenstein treatise, an Auden poem or a Shakespeare play
essentially stylistic?” This is a
telling—not to mention rhetorical—question. For one thing, it simply posits without argument that these objects of
beauty or skill or intellect do in fact “draw us,” that is, attract our
attention. I think this is a slightly
troubled assertion. Yes, we all recognize
these names—see below, however, for one exception—but is that recognition
itself fairly equated with attention? I
hadn’t been thinking about Pollock or Auden until Goldhaber mentioned
them. It seems to me, too, that the
lately trendy notion of “the long tail” both supports Goldhaber’s assumption by pointing out how objects commanding
very slight attention are nevertheless becoming easier to market via the web,
but also undercuts it by reducing the importance of a large critical mass of attention
to viable markets. Wittgenstein isn’t
exactly selling like iPods.
Goldhaber’s question thus begs additional questions, such
as: Who exactly is being drawn? And what sort of attention is being
attracted? If an economy of attention is
a response to the global spread of information traversing the ’net and the web,
it’s hard to imagine that the audiences for Auden, Wittgenstein, and the rest have
as a consequence expanded proportionally and therefore account for the evolution
of this new economy. (Until I read the
review, I hadn’t heard of Sharapova, and when I searched for more, uh,
information about her, I learned that she has attracted a notable degree of
online attention, indeed.) And can it
really be suggested that a Bach cantata now must compete for attention with,
say, a pop-up ad for a second mortgage? The
word “attention,” like “information,” is being used as well in multiple “highly
misleading” senses to denote distinct characteristics of enduring cultural
stature, product name recognition, or distracting trivia.
Another problem is that while Goldhaber plainly intends his
rhetorical question to be answered “no,” it could just as reasonably be
answered “yes.” Style is critical to the
effect of these works. I think his
qualifying adverb, the too absolute “essentially,” could work to prompt a negative response, but
why should a dispute over the value of rhetoric and style to attention-getting
be over essences? (The Bach example poses
a related problem, which Goldhaber circumvents by specifying a cantata, a
musical work with a textual component. Had he proffered instead a ’cello suite as his example, it would have complicated
the argument for a less “essential” component than style.) For Goldhaber, in addition to style there’s
something “deeper” at work in these examples, an implication that style is merely
superficial. The endless debate over the
relative merits of style and substance will be resolved by neither Lanham nor
Goldhaber, but the conclusion doesn’t matter much, really, because Lanham is
interested in the special significance and utility of style in a world glutted
with substance. He is not urging poets,
composers, or attractive and talented young tennis players who seek attention
to do so in an “essentially stylistic” way.
At times, Goldhaber becomes downright mean. The book goes “off the rails,” and he finds one
passage “silly.” He condescendingly
judges Lanham’s interest in typography “entertaining, but not very central,” an
“old curiosit[y].” I don’t see how the
passages he attacks merit such scorn or mockery, and just because Lanham fails
to mention “the dialectic” or Neils Bohr doesn’t mean he is unaware of either,
as Goldhaber infers. (I even wrote in my
review, well before reading Goldhaber’s, “I don’t recall Lanham even once using
the word ‘dialectic’ in his new book, but on reflection I think that’s what he
describes as style’s confrontations with substance….” Leaving that particular “highly misleading”
word out of his text is arguably a virtue.) He finds the book “cobbled together” and “disjoint,” and therefore
somehow an affront to some ideal function of the material book and more
appropriate to a blog. More petty
criticisms include taking Lanham to task for including a photograph of himself
on the book’s cover and for deigning to recommend his ideas toward a revival of
the humanities in academia. Really,
Goldhaber needn’t have taken these swipes. Nevertheless, I recommend his review, his earlier writings on the
attention economy, and Lanham’s stimulating, amusing book.
Accidental Blogger 
6 responses to “Attention Revisited and Reviewed (Dean)”
Dean, I thank you for this review of my review, although I think you misunderstand some of my comments.
I think Lanham’s book is utter proof of his own love of attention, and I strongly suspect his failure to mention me at all was because he wanted to claim a priority he doesn’t deserve. I did not criticize him for having his picture on the back flap, but rather pointed out that his doing so was consistent with his wanting attention , and is now quite standard. I pointed out that he looked uncomforable in that picture, hardly a criticism of his including it.
In my view, there is nothing wrong, per se, in wanting attention. You want attention too, hence your blog, and to get it you must compete with everyone else who wants it, though your possible audience is different, say from Bach’s (who of course does not now compete directly, but only through those who record or promulgate his works) and from that for a pop-up mortgage ad. A Bach suite for unaccompanied cello gets at least my attention for more than style, but rather for the sublime mastery within a style, and for the emotional content which, while expressed within a style goes far deeper than style. Plenty of Baroque works have a stylistic similarity, but what gets my attention, at least, is the deeper level. Lanham is simply wrong to suggest that the attention economy is primarily about style.
Lanham does not suggest that economics in general is primarily a matter of rhetoric. You seriously misread him if you think he does. (See the work by McCloskey that he mentions very approvingly for a clearer expostion of what Lanham seems to endorse.) Lanham does incorrectly think that the economics of attention is basically a matter of rhetoric, though that view does have some validity.
You also misread me in thinking that I am advocating that attention is merely a new currency. I recommend that readers read my review one or two times, and read my other work on the attention economy to see my position further. If they care to, they may also read Lanham’s book, to get a better sense of what is at stake in the argument.
Anyway, thanks for the attention.
Best,
Michael
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Dean:
As I understand it (and my understanding is sketchy), Mr. Goldhaber may be more annoyed with Lanham’s failure to acknowledge him as the originator of the Economy of Attention, rather than with his market ideas. I haven’t read either book but did get an inkling of what they are about. Rather a clearer one of Lanham’s position than Goldhaber’s.
Correct me if I am wrong. Is Goldhaber’s position that while attention is the scarce commodity in the marketplace, “style” is not necessarily the right currency for its purchase? That “the content of the character” of products and ideas is what should attract our attention? In a perfect world, perhaps that will be true. “IF” we have the time to pay enough “ATTENTION.” Meanwhile, style will triumph often over substance even if it is to the detriment of the human condition.
Goldhaber being a scientist, is understandabley upset by the public’s preference of fluff over stuff. Due to the mostly empirical nature of the natural sciences, verifiable at least in this physical universe, the standard is easier to uphold in the sciences. But even there, given the ever changing paradigms in biological / medical research, the truth often is reachable only through a winding, tortuous path. The humanites and social sciences are a different story altogether, including the “science” of economics. (I will post a link to a rather interesting article on that matter soon.)
But even in the domain of the exact sciences, style does occasionally become the engine that drives substance, some would say. Newton over Leibnitz (calculus), Galileo over Copernicus, Faraday over John Tyndall and as some believe in India, Marconi over J.C. Bose (wireless transmission) may be all examples of successfully popularizing a substantive idea.In more recent times, arguments over P.C. vs Mac, VHS vs Beta and numerous other electronic gadgetry are screaming examples.
So, I don’t see a problem with Lanham’s recommendation of taking the “plunger of rhetoric” to the market place. Unfortunately, our preference for style over substance may indeed diminish our lives at some level, making for a more superficial existence perhaps. But that is the sign of our times and has more to do with the explosion in consumer goods and ideas (the “real” economy) rather than style alone (attention being a finite commodity). Where it does do “real” harm is when we choose our leaders on the basis of empty rhetoric over substance – George W. Bush being the most tragic example in recent times.
The fact that Jackson Pollock and Maria Sharapova figured on Goldhaber’s list of the sublime, proves to me that he too is not above the lure of style.
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Reading both Michael’s and Ruchira’s comments, I sense that I take a very different view of style, for I credit it with a broader scope and greater integral value than do they. A glimpse at the OED definitions, attending only to those that pertain to writing, language, and fashion, will indicate the breadth I have in mind, and which I admit I believe Lanham had in mind, too. I may be mistaken about Lanham, who disapproves reading exclusively for style as much as he does exclusively for substance, but I think I take more seriously than either Michael or Ruchira does the formal entanglements of style and substance, and the importance of not ultimately viewing style as superficial or subsidiary to substance.
A case in point from each: Michael picks up my remarks about his Bach example, and suggests that a Bach ’cello suite would just as well demonstrate the “deeper” value of substance over style he has in mind. He equates that substance with “sublime mastery” and “emotional content” within the style. I gather that here he is viewing style in terms of the aggregate of forms, themes, and performance practices that come to identify a historical period of musical production, such as the Baroque. In this respect, the musical content of a Bach ’cello suite, however difficult that may be to specify, certainly transcends (or sidesteps) the norms of the stylistic period from which it emerged. But that is a narrow view of style that forecloses a consideration of the intimate relationship of style to substance comprising the work itself and any particular performance of the work.
For Ruchira’s part, I’m not so sure that the example of Bush as a victory of harmful style (“empty rhetoric”) over substance is apt. If Bush were merely gauche, we wouldn’t have so much to complain about. The phrase “empty rhetoric,” however, suggests not stylistic ineptitude, but hypocrisy or dissimulation, both bad behaviors. I hasten to add that one can’t help but lie or contradict oneself in some fashion engaging the elements of a style, and that a more stylistically elegant or attractive liar may be more deserving of our disdain by virtue of that fact—hence, the epithet “smooth talker”—but I don’t think Bush fits that bill. (Then again, Lanham points out that at one time rhetoric was perceived to be “a training in lying.”)
Michael is correct that Lanham does not explicitly equate economics with rhetoric and that Lanham’s focus is on rhetoric as an economics of attention. But Lanham does spend a healthy handful of pages discussing the relation of rhetoric and economics (i.e., the economics of stuff and business), in which he at least wants the reader to recognize a rhetorical component to economics proper before moving on the more centrally rhetorical enterprise of an economics of attention. Of the McCloskey book to which Michael refers, Lanham writes, “That she argues for one-quarter of economic activity as rhetorical emboldened me to pursue my argument.” Shortly thereafter he notes, “Persuasion and motivation—the center of rhetorical teaching—also stood at the center of business enterprise.” I offer these quotes not so much to prove my statement that Lanham seeks “to identify economics as a species of rhetoric,” but to indicate why I uttered that bit of overstatement.
I also grant that Michael did not outright criticize Lanham for his book jacket photo. The passage of his review in which he mentions the photo more precisely addresses the practice by academic publishers of adding photos of authors to their book jackets. I disagree, however, that the imputation of discomfort to Lanham lacks a critical purpose. Here’s the last half of the paragraph of Michael’s review in which the remarks appear:
I have two responses to this passage. The first relates to the photo and Lanham’s purported ill ease. What I read here is a suggestion that Lanham, in spite of his “feelings,” is a “perfectly sensible” attention seeker, that he is in other words mercenary. Michael doesn’t say as much, and the passage could be read in other ways, but why else the ad hominem reference to Lanham’s displeasure? (Besides, since I read a library copy of the book, processed without the book jacket, I never saw the photo. Now, having seen it, I don’t detect any particular displeasure on Lanham’s part. It’s just a stock author portrait, as far as I can tell.) This is why I characterized this passage as “petty criticism” in my review of Michael’s review.
In the first part of the paragraph from which this excerpt was selected, Michael wants to suggest that our attention is captured by more than an author’s “utterances themselves,” especially now that we have access to more personal information about the author, his photo, for instance, or to his “autobiographical tidbits” sprinkled throughout the text. My second response to the passage relates to its second half, which Michael announces with this reference to autobiographical elements in Lanham’s book. I have to say that I agree with Ruchira that Michael seems irritated with Lanham’s refusal to acknowledge his priority. When I learned about Michael’s writing while I was reading the book—not to mention about the fact that the two had appeared years ago on panels together!—I was also puzzled by Lanham’s silence. I remain puzzled, and the lapse is a fair cause of upset, but in this passage it seems to backfire. Much of Lanham’s book is composed in the first person, and even when it isn’t it’s clear that Lanham is its omniscient author. This is a function of style, unsurprisingly—it’s conversational and mildly confessional, but such a style helps to inform the readers of at least some of the sources of Lanham’s ideas, and it reminds us that no real economist is writing. Most of the autobiographical material appears in the “Background Conversations” chapters, in which he simply summarizes books he recommends to interested readers, books he has found to be important in his studies. I fail to see how this slightly fleshed-out bibliographic apparatus doesn’t exceed bare relevance.
I gather that Michael views this fashioning and presentation of self as an instance par excellence of the kind of attention-seeking at the basis of the new attention economy. For him, it’s all about noting the person in the work, recognizing the human component to work that heretofore has been consumed without such recognition. Style helps, but the goal is a more transparent interface between attention-seekers and attention-givers. Books without author photos made it easier for the reader to ignore or perhaps to idealize or sublimate the author. Now photos help personalize them and give them a face, just as advances in web and network technologies help remote people to meet, share information, and even become friends or mutual suppliers of reliable expert knowledge.
I don’t entirely buy this view of information technologies, the internet, the web, and social networking forums (such as this very blog). Negotiation of attention contributes part of the dynamic of some of these resources, but it doesn’t account for them all. I imagine that for some participants the motivation is less to amass attention to themselves or their works than to propagate enthusiasm about the topics to which they devote their time and energy. I view Lanham’s approach as largely stylistic, if perhaps also a bit egocentric. Maybe better authors use the strategy more successfully: Stanley Fish comes to mind, but then there’s also Montaigne or Samuel Johnson (of whom I thought because Lanham uses him for a chapter epigraph). I suspect—or at least I hope—that we will continue to evaluate these and other arbiters for our attention in terms of their relative stylistic ambitions and achievements, and not merely in terms of the degree to which they monopolize our attention.
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Dean:
Thanks for your detailed explanation. I agree with you that not all blogs are necessarily about attracting attention to the bloggers. At least A.B. is not – bloggers here write very little about their own selves except in relation to the topic at hand. A.B was launched exactly for the reason you suggest – to get like minded readers to become excited about certain issues. As I had indicated in my inaugural post, the main objective in my case was to relentlessly focus on the misdeeds of the Bush administration.
The very fact that George Bush is not a smooth talker and that he has a fractured, bumbling style, endeared him to the American voters when they compared him to Clinton’s (Slick Willy) more polished, cerebral ways. Bush comes from an uppercrust, Ivy League, aristocratic Yankee background, compared to Clinton’s truly hardscrabble, middle class Arkansas childhood. Yet people perceived Bush as a regular Joe Six Pack they could have a beer with in their neighborhood sports bar and Clinton as the snobbish intellectual. Bush avoided combat duties when it was his time to serve. But people perceived him as the plain spoken, valiant warrior and John Kerry, a decorated combat veteran, as a weak kneed, double talker. A carefully cultivated lack of style too is a style.
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Dean:
One other thing. I completely agree with you that in the arts (art, literature and music), style is an integral part of the content. That is what distinguishes brilliant from the merely pedestrian.
I was focused on more prosaic pursuits like science or even sports, where style should not greatly affect the value of the eventual outcome, but often does. But even there, if you take applied sciences and technology, which are product oriented, style is part of the content.
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Your points about science in your comments, Ruchira, are well taken. Indeed, there is a segment of the literature of the history of science that addresses the contribution of intersubjective factors, such as reputation, to the ascendancy of certain ideas and achievements over others.
On a tangent: this curious Clinton/Bush chiasmus, in which their objective biographical data correlate with their opposite stereotypical class characteristics is fascinating. I don’t particularly credit the public perceptions you relate, but you know, maybe it really would be more fun having a beer with Bush than with Clinton.
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