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

If attention is our raw material, what can we create from attention that is a good? I say it's meaning. Meaning-production, then would be the establishmnet of symbolic orders or frames of reference within which we contextualize that which we put our attention to, in a sense, meaning-production creates more attention. Hollywood and glossy magazines produce low-quality meaning efficiently, giving us archetypes and culture into which we can channel our attention. A conversation over dinner, or in a class creates a higher quality meaning that is more thoroughly integrated into our system.

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.