Valeria Balza
On Lanaham’s The Economic of Attention: Chapter Four
Richard Lanaham notes that despite the convenience that comes with electronic
texts in the form of portability and artistic versatility, society continues to refrain from
accepting and utilizing “the thinking alphabet” as a preferable mode of expression (131).
He further suggests that society condemns electronic texts due to their initial failure in the
market, the supposed strain that electronics screens pose on the eyes, the fact that
physical books are considered talismans, the difficulty in regulating copyright claims, the
lack of intellectual and creative seriousness surrounding electronic texts, and lastly, the
fact that society fears that electronic texts seem to “blur conceptual thought” (136). Do
these arguments seem to suggest that society does, in fact, seem to judge books by their
cover (cheesy, I know)?
Lanaham supports this claim by suggesting that in the intellectual sphere, “the
binding authenticates the package” (136). Why is it that individuals allocate more
seriousness to a printed version of a text? What is, then, the rhetoric of print that makes it
superior to that of electronic texts? I can include myself in the group of people that
continue to enjoy reading a physical book more than an electronic text. As Lanaham
suggests, there is something distracting with electronic texts that perhaps renders them
less intellectually serious. Whenever I read on my kindle, I find myself fumbling with the
brightness and size of the text, trying to figure out how many pages I have left, and often
having to pause to get my charger. Perhaps these distractions inhibit us from
understanding the content of the text at the same level we do when we read it in print.
Perhaps we can’t get lost in the screen as we get lost on a page because our mind cannot
commit to just the screen. Perhaps the, the binding does matter as much as the content, if
not more. Will electronic texts gain favorability if their rhetoric is somehow adjusted to
eliminate distractions?