“We have been thinking about human communication in an incomplete and inadequate way, a way based on stuff, not attention” (132)

“Words are like things and ideally should be things” (137)

“What happens when the economy is not based on stuff but on information and the attention that makes sense of it? And what happens when we move from the fixity of print to the volatility of digital expression?” (138)

“Our failure to use digital expression in a fruitful and efficient way comes from a theoretical misunderstanding. We are thinking about it using an incomplete set of templates for thought. Just when our expressive horizons have been expanded, we want to narrow them We have been thinking about electronic text as the wrong type of revolution. We have confused an extension of the Gutenberg revolution in replication and distribution with a revolution in expressive logic” (144)

“Information can be moved from one sensory modality to another while still being driven by the same data” (143)

My attention, however, drifts. What is my economy of attention when, despite Lanham’s appeal, I feel as if I’ve heard it all before: the question of text, the rise of electronic writing, the heritage of electronic writing, and so on. I don’t feel that I’m moving through this text, but rather, I’m moving around it. I’m moving around the familiar positions. My attention falters.

My reading attention, indeed, has been drifting: through blogs and websites, through current events, through ideas for dinner, through reading: through Lanham, Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis, through Wood’s The Power of Maps, through Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs, and now even through a novel, Perdido Street Station. I move in and out of these places with ease (hmmmm….interesting) and with difficulty (am I obligated to finish this book??). I move through the texts.

Which is how I am imagining my new project on Detroit - a movement through spaces. Which also could stand for a type of writing model akin to the MediaCommons idea (or within such an idea); a need for something other (not in place of) stand alone writings among academics (i.e. uploaded papers). I’m not attracted to the idea of another clearing house of papers put online - or put online faster than a print publication would allow for. I’d like a space to drift within, adding, reading, thinking about, commenting on as I move through the writings, as I read some and not others, as I sample and frament my way along. “We have been thinking about human communication in an incomplete and inadequate way,” Lanham writes. The question is not that we should replicate already existing apparatuses, but invent (or try to invent) new structures based on new logics.

Oh. I guess Lanham does have my attention after all. In a drifting sort of way.