The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information - Couverture souple

Lanham, Richard A.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0226468674 ISBN 13 : 9780226468679

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2007

Synopsis

If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information.

With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

Lanham’s The Electronic Word was one of the earliest and most influential books on new electronic culture. The Economics of Attention builds on the best insights of that seminal book to map the new frontier that information technologies have created.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Richard A. Lanham is professor emeritus of English at UCLA and President of Rhetorica, Inc. He has written ten books, including A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and Literacy and the Survival of Humanism.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0226468674
• ISBN 13: 9780226468679
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 326
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible