Attention Economy?

This post is slightly jared from my previous post but please stick with it. In today's seminar we looked at an article by Richard Lanham in which he discusses the 'Attention Economy'.

Economics...studies the allocation of scarce resources....we live in an "information economy". But information is not in short supply in the new information economy. We#re drowning in it. What we lack is human attention to make sense of it all. It will be easier to find our place in the new regime if we think of it as an economy of attention. Attention is the economy in short supply.

In this article he discusses that people attention is what the people are bidding for in today's mediated society. He is a member of rhetoric which harks back to the ancient Greeks when politicians used to take techniques from actors so that they could capture the peoples attention in public addresses. He expresses a belief that if modern companies were to follow in this stead and increasingly use performance to bring attention to their product they would be able to secure a chunk of the 'attention economy'. So perhaps theatrical performance has a larger part to play in today's information rich society than it may first appear.