Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994
Richard A. Lanham
University of California-Los Angeles
I rarely get a chance to speak to such a distinguished and focused audience, and I mean to make the most of you. I would like your help in thinking through an argument that emerged towards the end of my last book, The Electronic Word. The argument, which seems simple enough, goes this way:
If, as seems generally acknowledged, economics is the "study of how human beings allocate scarce resources to produce various commodities and how those commodities are distributed..." (Columbia Encyclopedia, p. 829);
And if, as seems generally acknowledged, we are now moving from the goods economy to an information economy;
Then, it would seem to follow that the scarce resource whose allocation economics studies is now information.
But, as also seems generally acknowledged--I hope my little variation to the beginning sentence of Pride and Prejudice doesn't go unpublished--information is not a scare resource. We are drowning in it. Our relation to it has been likened to drinking from a fire hose.
What, then, in an information economy, is the scarce commodity?
Must it not be human attention, the action that converts raw data into something humans can use?
And, if this is so, what follows from such an economics of human attention?
These, then, are the two questions that I will ask you:
Do we find ourselves in the economy not of "information," as everyone thinks, but of human attention?
And, if so, what follows from this conclusion?
You are, so far as I can see--and I am an outsider to your world--the perfect people to answer these questions. If I may allegorize for a moment, you are all currently playing the role of the Duke of York in Shakespeare's Richard II. You remember the play. Henry Bolingbroke comes to England to usurp the throne; he plays the role of digital technology. King Richard is busy in Ireland, fighting the wrong war at the wrong time; he plays the role of the university administration. John of Gaunt, the king's uncle, responds to the crisis with a great deal of heartfelt and extremely wordy proverbial wisdom about the Good Old Days; he plays the role of the faculty. Meanwhile, the Duke of York, Gaunt's brother, is left in charge of the Kingdom. He cannot run away to Ireland; he cannot take refuge in self-serving proverbial guff. He must act. As he says, in a crucial way, "Somewhat we must do." So with libraries right now.
Let me, then, pursue this argument, at least sketchily, and ask you to find the holes in it or where it holds water, to ponder the implication for research libraries. There are some implications, I promise you.
One line of economic thinking simply takes information as a third kind of "good," not intrinsically different from the other two categories, "goods" and "services," with which economics traditionally deals. But more thoughtful people have seen that information differs fundamentally from the goods and services of an industrial economy. Walter Wriston, for example, writes in a recent book on the digital globalization of finance:
The world desperately needs a model of economics of information that would schematize its forms and functions. But even without such a model one thing will be clear: when the world's most precious resource is immaterial, the economic doctrines, social structures, and political systems that evolved in a world devoted to the service of matter become rapidly ill-suited to cope with the new situation. The rules and customs, skills and talents necessary to uncover, capture, reduce, preserve, and exploit information are now mankind's most important rules, customs, skills, and talents. (Walter Wriston is the former President of CitiBank; the book is The Twilight of Sovereignty, 19-20.)
Wriston argues that not only the conceptual structure but the very terminology, the bookkeeping terms and practices, of traditional economics no longer work in a world of digital information. Where, then, might we look for guidance for this new economics? And will it be an economics of information, as Wriston calls it, or one of attention? Let's look in a few places, familiar and not so familiar, for guidance. For, if traditional economics no longer provides a reliable guide, we may find guidance anywhere.
Various terms are used for information, depending on how much attention is devoted to it. No attention gives you "raw data." Some attention gives you "massaged data." Lots of attention gives you "useful information." Maximal attention gives you "wisdom." And so on. This plethora of terms will eventually settle down into three states--Low, Middle and High--like prose style and many other terminological disputes; the principles of tacit bargaining will see to that. Let us then, for nomenclatural ease, use three terms: Data, Information, and Wisdom. Which of these three do we feel is in shortest supply?
Starting on the humble level of our day-to-day lives, surely it must be Information and Wisdom. We are drowning in Data. Magazines accumulate. Catalogues inundate. Email messages agglomerate. Our "books to read" lists expand geometrically--or at least mine expands geometrically; I still read books. We do not have time, as we say, to "make sense of it." That is, we do not have time, do not know how, to construct the human-attention structures that would make data useful to us both for--to take the oldest two categories in economics--private life and public life, domestic economy and political economy.
Moving now to a higher level, the professional processing of information, let me make immediate use of present company. Wriston writes that the "rules and customs, skills and talents necessary to uncover, capture, produce, preserve, and exploit information are now mankind's most important rules, customs, skills, and talents." That would seem to be, consideratis considerandis, just what do you folks do for a living? Do you feel stronger pressures to accumulate new Data or organize it into Information? (Wisdom, of course, is best left to the faculty.) In the little reading I have done in your field, it has seemed to me that you are spending more time and money in creating Gateways, Networks, and other new attention-structures that revolutionize the "reference desk" than you are in trying to out-acquisition your traditional rivals in number of volumes. Is this so?
In the digital universe, the institution most analogous to research libraries is, of course, the world of banking. Banks used to be based on taking in deposits and lending out money, much as libraries used to be based on acquiring books and lending them out. The banking world is now being utterly transformed; people do not deposit monies with banks because they can get better returns in mutual funds; businesses do not borrow from them because they can raise money more easily in other ways. To survive, banks are now creating, from the digital stuff of instantaneous global data, new attention-structures for savers and borrowers, new investment instruments. This process, called "securitization," looks to me very much like the situation research libraries now face in trying to reorient themselves to the changing world of teaching and research. You have to orchestrate your traditional activities in new ways and create new activities to fit an altered universe of learning. The banks are, so far as I can see, about half a dozen years ahead of you on the digital curve, and I am sure that you are watching their progress with as much interest as I am. Though they call it "information," really they are creating a new economy of attention.
Let us now look for a moment in an unexpected place, the world of twentieth-century art. I just had the pleasure of seeing the soon-to-be released Maysles Brothers' film on Christo's latest environmental art project, called "Umbrellas." In this now-famous project, Christo erected a myriad of large umbrellas in two locations, one a rainy valley in Japan and the other a desert mountain pass near where I live in southern California. Christo's works, from the Running Fence to the wrapped Pont Neuf, constitute not so much objects as temporary attention-structures to make us pause and ponder how we engage in large-scale collective human effort. This latest project intensifies that strategy by inserting umbrellas in two very different geographies and two different societies. The center of the project, which cohered gradually, as in all of Christo's grand designs, became the contrast in how each culture went about its work, both social and geographic. "Umbrellas," that is, became an exploration of contrasting human attention-structures. (By the way, the Maysles film captured this contrast perfectly.)
Everywhere you look in contemporary art, the focus falls on human attention. Think, for example, of the conceptual artists, who felt that organizing human attention was the fundamental locus of art, not making physical objects. (Those of you who think about the aesthetics of digital expression will recognize here a founding premise. In the digital world, the essence is the code; the physical realization is only a temporary print-out, or, truly for argument, conceptual art.) Or remember Rauschenberg's all-white paintings which take their patterns only from the light of the room where they are hung. Or think of the work of Robert Irwin, whose extraordinary career has drawn him steadily away from objects like paintings to painting-like objects constructed of space, transparent cloth, and light which model human attention-structures in action, try to show us how we see while we are in the act of seeing. Many of you saw the recent Roy Lichtenstein retrospective and noticed there how Lichtenstein, early in his career, would take as his subject popular attention-structures, starting with the comic strip. The scarce commodity--does art always take this as its subject--is how human attention sorts out an overpowering flow of information.
Or one thinks of the father, one might say the Pop of Pop Art, Andy Warhol. His whole career constitutes an illustration of the economics of attention. When he bragged that "we weren't just at the exhibit, we were the art exhibit, we were the art incarnate and the '60s were really about people, not about what they did," he was feeling his way into this new economy. As he remarked on another occasion: "Fashion wasn't what you wore somewhere anymore, it was the whole reason for going." (Warhol 60's, p. 187) Two economists, Ginzberg and Vojta, have made the same point: "We continue to call ours a capitalist economy," they write in Beyond Human Scale (p. 20), "but a more descriptive term would be a `human economy' since it is human resources that dominate all economic activity, from the research laboratory to retailing." (I think probably Warhol has a better time, don't you? When I started thinking about this, I realized I did not know anything about economics, and it seemed to me, in the beginning, that this would be a handicap.) I do not have time for further examples, but it would not be an exaggeration, I think, to call the Pop Art explosion the "Arts of Attention Management," so obsessed were they with the new economics of human capital and human attention.
Moving now from the macroeconomic world of Pop Art, let me adduce one final, and unfamiliar, example of what we might call a microeconomics of attention. Then, I will assume, for present purposes that I have demonstrated my case for an economics of attention and will proceed to its implications for your world of research libraries.
The center of the digital revolution is a rich signal that can be expressed alphabetically, imagistically, or sonically but which remains, in essence, without sensory commitment. As I have argued in the Electronic Word, this rich signal is destined to dissolve the present boundaries of the learned disciplines, and the classes, classrooms, traditional buildings, and professorial work-rules built upon them. It creates its own internal economy of attention. The best instantiation of this internal economy I know of is one that academics find both exotic and off-putting--the cockpit of a jet fighter-plane. Here for the first time the rich signal manifested in alphabetic and numerical information, in iconic displays, and in audio signals, had to be mixed into a single functioning information structure. The problem avionics designers face is the same problem all of us face in daily life. The data comes at you so thick and fast that the mind cannot make sense of it. For the fighter pilot, a careful orchestration of digital visualization and sonification with alpha/numerical data has been contrived to buffer this overload.
The devices used there are beginning to find their way into daily life. The heads-up display that allows the pilot to look at information on a windscreen that he (and shortly at least for the F-16, she) can also look through has now come to automobile windshields. The whole dramatic environment of the fighter cockpit--and it is the defining theatrical space for our time--has now been adopted by the entertainment business as basic literary genre for what we call "motion-based rides" like the "Back to the Future" ride at Universal Studios. (If the characteristic glide path of medieval romance was a horseback ride through a dark wood, the generic path in modern romance is a fighter doing a laser-guided, low-altitude overflight of enemy ground.) If one is looking for a glimpse of what literacy will look like in the future, the fighter cockpit is a good place to look, though of course those who concern themselves with literacy questions, at least in the university, are too fastidious to look there. (The most interesting conversation I have had about literacy at the end of the twentieth century was with a fellow who designed avionic displays for fighters. He knew all the basic questions and a good many of the answers.) It contains the whole logic of multimedia expression. That ought to interest you, since I think the final replacement for the card catalog will be a multimedia environment of just this sort.
Now, I have at least sketched a case for you to consider--that we live in an economy of human attention rather than one of information. If this is so, what follows, and more especially, what follows for people in your line of work?
What follows is that the human imagination, which in a goods economy stands necessarily at the margin, returns to center stage. We have been living in a long Newtonian interlude when real reality was an affair of things; what we thought about things, the soyuata as against the payuata of human life, was poetic, essentially ornamental. Now, that figure/ground relationship has reversed. It is not that all reality has become virtual, but that we live again in a world where virtual reality can in fact have a reality of its own. Let me repeat my quotation from Walter Wriston:
When the world's most precious resource is immaterial, the economic doctrines, social structures, and political systems that evolved in a world devoted to the service of matter become rapidly ill-suited to cope with the new situation.
How can we cope with the new situation?
Well, I do not think we are without resource. As for an economics of attention, we have one, 2,000 years old, that goes by the now discredited name of "rhetoric." It has always been a verbal art and will now have to be strengthened and enriched with image and sound. But the broad outlines, at least, of an economics of attention, lie deep, and secure, in the Western intellectual tradition. If you want to pursue this argument, I have developed it at length in The Electronic Word.
Coming to recognize the historic centrality of rhetoric will not be easy. The anti-rhetorical, or as Jonas Barish calls it, the anti-theatrical, prejudice runs equally deep in that tradition. The patterns of thought and feeling that have made rhetoric a synonym for deception will not accommodate themselves gracefully to a precious resource that is immaterial, but they will have to. The old economics of stuff is just too misleading.
Especially, the old theory of communication based on stuff. In the stuff world, communication is easy. I have a parcel of thought and feeling. I package it up and send it to you. You unwrap it and use it. If it is a library book, when you are finished, you return it. (Then, of course, you get fined $80 for not returning it, have to go find where someone has mis-shelved it, and physically produce it to get the fine cleared.) For, finally, the library theory of communication is based on the simple exchange model. The model also describes a theory of prose style, indeed of all expression, one that I have called the Clarity-Brevity-Sincerity or "C-B-S" model. In an economics of attention, the transaction is considerably more complex. The exchange is not simply the rational market, one so beloved by the economists of stuff. In an economics of attention, people bring a complex calculus of pleasure to the free market of ideas and make all kinds of purchases there.
We will have need of the past in other new ways, I think. Let me give you just one example. It is being argued from several different points of the compass that information is a new dominant metaphor for thinking about the world, following upon the heels of matter and energy. We look, to take a simple example, at the furniture in our living room and see not so much a couch, chairs, and tables--a configuration of matter and energy--as the information needed to orchestrate them: the knowledge needed to harvest, ship, and work the wood; to fabricate, dye, and market the cloth; to design the furniture; to ship, market, and advertise it; and so on.
The information model, that is, teaches us to see not a world of objects but of hidden forces and forms, which those objects allegorize. Is the habit of mind thus engendered really so different from the deeply allegorical habit of mind of medieval life and thought? When the Middle Ages saw the immanence of God as informing all things, were they not thinking in the same pattern that we, with the information metaphor, seek to iterate? Don't we really know quite a lot about such structures of attention, once we remember where to look? And when we do look, don't we find that, just as with the allegorical habit of mind, we have to do finally within an economy of attention rather than information? What do you think?
I ask you not only because I value your opinions and take this opportunity to solicit them, I ask also because I think the new economics concerns you and your world in the most intimate way.
This conference is about the library in "The Day After Tomorrow." The vision of that Day After Tomorrow for the university is clear enough, at least in outline. It emerges from the materials sent to me for this conference and the desultory reading I have done in your field. We will have a campus information system that unites the library, the university press, the bookstore, and a new instructional database into a single developing network. The design of the university curriculum will be the design, and continued development of, this information system. The people who design this network, teach in it, and maintain it, whatever their new job description reads, will be part of the same professional group.
Again, there is a clear model for what is going on in another neck of the American woods--the entertainment business. That world now assumes that the people who create the product, the people who produce and sell the product, the people who transmit the product, and the people who store it for future sales and repackaging are now all part of the same business. In a digital world, the structural logic runs self-similar across disparate activities. That is one of the most interesting things about it.
I have not spoken about this intrinsic logic as it is now manifesting itself in the library world because I assumed that you know much more about it than I do. But this logic is going to be played out in a new kind of economy, and unless one understands this economy, the changes it brings will make less than full sense. In an attention economy, libraries and librarians move center stage. Librarians no longer facilitate thinking done elsewhere. The "thinking" will be the construction of attention-structures, and they--that is to say, you--will be in the middle of it. The theory of communication that set you on the margin no longer applies. It is part of a goods economy.
One of your number, Ross Atkinson of Cornell, was kind enough to send me several of his excellent essays. In the thoughtful letter that accompanied them, he said, "Our job is maintaining the signifiers, and leaving the decryption of the signifieds to the readers." With all due respect, I argue the opposite case. The marketplace of an attention economy does not permit this nice separation. The digital world puts the library world right in the middle of things as the print world never did.
A hot search is now on for various software intelligence agents that will create "gateways" of one sort or another without further human intervention. Without for a moment denigrating these needful activities, I cannot believe they will substitute for human attention-structures. The frame problem that has dogged Artificial Intelligence from the beginning will simply reassert itself. The gateways will have to be constructed by a new kind of human architect, one whose professional specialization has not yet emerged. Why not make the library and the library school the training grounds for this new architecture of information?
In a recent article on reference services, Jerry Campbell calls the present time "a cold, hungry night of change for librarians." I was struck by this phrase because my own thinking ran in just the opposite direction. What an extraordinarily interesting and promising time for libraries! In the new economy of human attention, hasn't the whole world come to your doorstep? It seems unlikely that the university faculty, imprisoned as we are in disciplinary boundaries now a hundred years old and self-regulated by the most restrictive work rules in the American labor market, will train the people the times require.
Why don't you all have a try? If we do indeed now live in an economy of attention, I do not see why it should prove a cold and hungry task at all.