reviews.indd


200 College & Research Libraries March 2007 

physical or intellectual phenomenon.” So 
while a star, a pebble, and a living animal 
are not documents, photographs and 
catalogues of stars are documents, stones 
in a museum of mineralogy are docu-
ments, and animals that are cataloged and 
shown in a zoo are documents. Books and 
similar written works are types of docu-
ments, and, given Briet’s understanding 
of documents, it follows that librarians 
are a type of “documentalist.” But Briet 
believes the documentalist profession 
also includes the roles of archivist and 
curator. While librarians preserve and 
conserve books (the exhibits of acquired 
facts), documentalists preserve, conserve, 
and interpret. The documentalist identifies, 
interprets, and disseminates documents 
relevant to researchers and subject spe-
cialists. This is similar to the role some 
special librarians play within research 
institutes or corporations. Most of Briet’s 
second essay expands on her concept 
of the documentalist profession. Much 
attention is given to the documentalist’s 
methods and instruments (most of which, 
she acknowledges, are borrowed from old 
techniques developed by similar profes-
sionals: e.g., librarians), and to the kind of 
education necessary for documentalists. 

In her final essay, “A Necessity of Our 
Time,” Briet considers how the docu-
mentation movement contributes to the 
progress and unification of civilization. 
Premising her remarks on the belief 
that humanity strives toward unity, she 
discusses how an international network 
made up of local document centers is 
the most feasible model for developing a 
unified, worldwide knowledge system, as 
contrasted with the “universal bibliogra-
phy” envisioned by many of her prede-
cessors. Ronald Day, assistant professor of 
library and information science at Wayne 
State University, offers a provocative in-
terpretation of the significance of Briet’s 
views and their implications for today’s 
information scientists. Day argues that 
Briet anticipated the enormous challenges 
to traditional library practices from new 
technologies, and as a result developed 

a broader understanding of what consti-
tutes a cultural document. Briet’s vision of 
the future of documentation is rooted in 
an understanding of the world as a patch-
work quilt of cultures producing myriad 
kinds of documents. Each culture and 
its documentation centers will require 
techniques and technologies suited to the 
different kinds of documents. Instead of 
seeking the universal library, Briet advo-
cates creating a network consisting of the 
documentation centers from every cul-
ture. According to Day, “Just as Culture 
is transformed in cultures, so the Library 
is dispersed into documentary techniques 
and technologies. This is something that 
still needs to be seen and reckoned with 
in library education and in library institu-
tions. Briet wrote of it a half century ago, 
and these changes have only increased 
since then.” 

A worthwhile read for librarians, infor-
mation scientists, and students.—W. Bede 
Mitchell, Georgia Southern University. 

Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of 
Attention: Style and Substance in the 
Age of Information. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2006. 312p. alk. 
paper, $29 (ISBN 0226468828). LC 
2005-22857. 

Like many before him, Richard Lanham 
is impressed by one of the big technologi-
cal changes of our time. For centuries, we 
have relied on various forms of paper and, 
to a lesser extent, other hardcopy surfaces 
to record, preserve, and transmit texts. 
But now we appear to be in the midst 
of an epochal shift, from these more fa-
miliar surfaces to an increasingly digital 
“expressive space.” Lanham began the 
inquiry reported in The Economics of At-
tention with the question “What’s next for 
text?”; but this narrower question of the 
movement from page to screen seemed to 
invite and perhaps even require reflection 
on an even broader one: “What’s new 
about the ‘new economy’ and what’s not?” 
The movement back and forth between 
these two issues creates the central ten-
sion of the argument. 



Book Reviews 201 

Many twentieth-century economists 
and other social commentators—perhaps 
most notably Fritz Machlup and Daniel 
Bell—noted a central shift beginning in 
the early twentieth century, from econo-
mies of goods to economies of services, 
and from producing and distributing 
commodities to the accumulation and the 
selective use of knowledge and informa-
tion. Originally taken for granted as an 
intangible add-on to production and dis-
tribution, information and knowledge are 
now recognized by economists as key ad-
ditions of value, and further as values in 
their own right. This great shift forms part 
of the assumed background of Lanham’s 
book, but he is actually more interested 
in one of its more recent consequences. 
This shift to producing and distributing 
information has created an entirely dif-
ferent kind of abundance: an abundance 
of the intangible, of intellectual goods 
and services, an abundance of ideas, 
facts, information, figures, and images. 
Thus we face a problem of the allocation 
of our attention to this ever-increasing 
load of informational value. How do we 
handle this? 

Lanham is here thinking beyond the 
typical operations of fi ltering, evaluating, 
and assessing that will already be familiar 
to scholars, librarians and information 
workers, publishers, and refl ective read-
ers. These he recognizes as essential to 
our attempts to manage a given output of 
information, but he really wants to raise 
the issue of how we respond to it in the 
first place—how do we allocate our atten-
tion to it? The greater the pool of available 
information, the harder it is to att end to 
items in it. Since scarcity is one of the chief 
conditions of value, and economics is 
essentially about valued resources, atten-
tion has come to have a distinct economic 
significance. Here he invokes the ancient 
rhetorical concept of oscillation, or the 
use of the mind to move back and forth 
between content and consciousness, ob-
ject and subject. He is recommending, in 
other words, that we not focus exclusively 
on the content or “stuff” of information, 

but rather what was originally regarded 
as the inessential “fluff” of the attention 
span. For in an “economy of attention” 
it will be the fluff that moves to center 
stage as it upstages the stuff. Style and 
substance change places as style becomes 
the new substance. 

The argument for the parallel transfor-
mations of the expressive space and the 
wider shifts from economies of goods, 
services, and information to an economy 
of attention is spun out in in the first five 
chapters. Chapter two engagingly and 
informatively explores the provocations 
of twentieth-century avant-garde move-
ments like futurism, dada, surrealism, 
expressionism, and the op and pop art 
of the postwar period by casting them as 
cultural high-brow versions of the atten-
tion-getting and eye-catching techniques 
so adroitly used in advertising and sales, 
marketing, branding, and the design-rich, 
media-created ideal worlds of power, ad-
venture, danger, sex, fun, status, and style. 
All of these effectively catch and hold our 
attention, if in different ways and for dif-
ferent purposes. Chapters three and four 
apply these considerations to the evolution 
of writing and printing and discuss how 
the expressive space might be enhanced 
by digitization’s ability to animate, enliven, 
and otherwise set sober text into ecstatic 
motion. Chapter five provides a concep-
tual framework uniting two alphabets: the 
rigidly fixed and self-effacing alphabet of 
“black and white” print that invites us to 
ignore it and look through it to the mean-
ing it transmits, and the “alphabet that 
thinks,” which attracts our attention to it 
directly, even as we are simultaneously 
invited to seek the meaning beyond it. 

The first five chapters, though marked 
by occasional uncritical declarations of 
the author’s affection for his own biases, 
are compelling and very much worth 
reading; the final three are more uneven. 
Chapter six, “Barbie and the Teaching 
of Righteousness,” presented as a kind 
of comic interlude, detracts from the 
momentum built by the first fi ve. The 
next-to-last chapter presents a sonorous 



202 College & Research Libraries 

hymn to the inherent superiority of online 
education; and the concluding chapter 
seems not to offer much that is new. But 
the integrated cogency of the first five 
make this book worthwhile nonetheless. 
The concept of “expressive space” is use-
ful as a way of conceptually organizing 
diverse types of communication; the use 
of the ancient rhetorical device of oscillat-
ing between surface and depth is adroit 
and insightful; and the author’s clever 
exploitation of font selection in his own 
textual design nicely reinforces the central 
importance of attention.—Michael F. Win-
ter, University of California, Davis. 

Meadow, Charles T. Messages, Meaning, 
and Symbols: The Communication of 
Information. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 
2006. 250p. alk. paper, $40 (ISBN 
0810852713). LC 2005-23069. 

Charles Meadow’s Messages, Meaning, and 
Symbols is intended to be an introductory 
text about information, communication, 
and knowledge for general readers, in-
formation science undergraduates, and 
“anyone from age fourteen or fift een up.” 
Meadow cuts a wide swath, attempting 
to survey the history of communication 
technologies, the nature of information, 
and the dense conceptual interrelation-
ship of communication, information, and 
knowledge. His style is conversational 
and informal, and, as befits an introduc-
tory work, the book contains dozens of 
photographs, drawings, graphs, and 
charts. 

The first third of the book outlines the 
history of communication, beginning 
with cave drawings and moving into 
the Internet age over the course of four 
chapters. Meadow defines and explains a 
number of important terms over the next 
two chapters, then continues the narrative 
with a discussion on messages, media, 
and the transmission of information. The 
book concludes with chapters on meaning 
and understanding, an overview chap-
ter entitled “Communication: The Full 
Monty,” and a summary chapter on the 
nature of communication and informa-

March 2007 

tion in the modern, technology-drenched 
world. Throughout the book, he provides 
numerous examples and anecdotal evi-
dence to support his points, sometimes 
at the expense of providing the kind of 
clear explanations that an introductory 
text needs when discussing such complex 
topics as meaning and understanding. 

Meadow covers a lot of territory 
here; it’s an ambitious undertaking to 
be so inclusive in such a thin volume, 
especially one pitched to the information 
science novice. Recognizing that such an 
approach sometimes precludes adding 
much depth, Meadow makes a point of 
sending his introductory-level readership 
to the many references listed in the book’s 
sixteen-page bibliography. He refers read-
ers to the Library of Congress’s online 
catalog, with the caveat that “many of 
the works listed are not easily available 
elsewhere.” He also states that “an inter-
ested reader must do a lot of searching, 
on the Web and in libraries. Many people 
seem to feel that all the information they 
might want is on the Web and is free. 
Both assumptions are wrong. Just as in 
archaeology, there is no substitute for 
digging.” This can hardly be encouraging 
news for the “general reader” without 
sophisticated searching skills or access 
to a good library. 

Upon inspection, however, it seems 
that Meadow himself sometimes relies 
on easily available Web resources in his 
research, rather than digging deeper. He 
frequently cites general reference sources 
such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, when 
more authoritative, subject-specifi c sourc-
es would be more appropriate. He cites 
the hobbyist Web site World War 2 History 
Info (www.worldwar2history.info/) for 
information about the Allied disinforma-
tion campaign prior to D-Day. Why use 
a hobbyist Web site, one that would fail 
a basic Web evaluation test for authority, 
when other sites that are more academic 
or authoritative are easily available? 

Some information he provides is 
incorrect. For instance, Meadow asserts 
that Navajo code talkers in World War 

www.worldwar2history.info