English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

On page twelve, Lanham posits Andy Warhol as the subversive prophet of attention economics. Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame would, theoretically, make attention both egalitarian and worthless. Or, we also have the internet where everyone is shouting but no one is listening.

When I first read this, I got to thinking that Lanham isn't giving communism a just consideration. He sets up this binary between democracy/capitalism (which rhetors support) and fascism (which philosophers support?!?). Admittedly, I'm trapped in a feedback loop of leftist political thinking, but it seems to me that true communism is entirely appropriate for the digital age. I concieve of a community-oriented; attention egalitarianism does not mean being a celebrity anymore than being a communist means living in a mansion. By establishing communities, my limited resource of attentoin can be assured maximum return of meaning because there's no fat cats (like the Hollywood machine) pilfering and exploiting the inevitable ambiguities.

These communities would have to be based on localities. The internet already attempts to localize based on thoughts and interests, such as this blog supposedly does. However, this course blog being the perfect example, I think that physical localities still matter, if only because we have not yet converted to a truly digital culture. Physical localities, like the ones foreseen in the Epic 2015 video, are crucial because they automatically establish localities of experience. I may find a support group for my various personality quirks that can transcend physical distance, but when I go to a dance recital, I want to ear-mark my valuable attention for those who will be able to appreciate that performance that I also saw. In attention egalitarianism, the solution is not more exposure, but rather more effecient exposure.

Rather than make a really long post, I'm gonna explain what I mean by effecient exposure in another post because I think a more fruitful analogy for labor in Lanham's framework would be meaning production.