The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business Book

Well, I found this a difficult read. When a friend gave it to me, he warned me that it might not be what I expected. What I expected on seeing the title was something on the attention economy - how we spent our attention. See the www.attentiontrust.org for an example.

This does have a little of that in here, but it's really about style and substance. On the one end is substance, we read/perceive the material and that's what matters. Fonts fade away, leaving the words. At the other end is style. We see calligraphy - the style matters more than the words. And in between, well there's a gradient.

While this was drummed into me as I read the book (unfortunately I had a little of it before in his other book on editing), it didn't really move me. The extensive footnotes at the end of the chapters were often more engaging than the actual text.

The final chapters felt a little out of place too. It was as if he had something to say, and, well, here's a book so let's add it. They were ostensibly about "universities in the attention economy." Here he ponders some thoughts about education such as "the ideal education is face-to-face, one-to-one education", "higher education, in its ideal form, proceeds in a setting sequestered in both time and space" and "the education every university offers should be generated in-house by resident faculty employed full time." While interesting, I found the link to the rest of the book tenuous.