Richard Lanham’s “Economics of Attention” begins with several metaphors and analogies that signify the love we have for things. The things we own, the clothing we wear are all ways humans love to display brand loyalty. As our generation continues to progress into materialism, people are more succumbed to the changes of style and thirst for it. But this also leads to the question, on who and how do precedents for the popular styles start.

This article brings up several questions that are related to the study of attention and how information is shared and acquired. For example, the article describes and tries to find answers to “what the new scarcity is, that economics seeks to describe?” (Lanham 7). All economics is surrounded by the human attention. With humans using their brains to transfer knowledge and information, businesses and firms can be successful. Our economy is characterized by attention scarcity.

Next, the article defines what human attention is, and the limitations of it. Lanham defines the human attention as something very complicated and unmeasurable. There are also ways to improve human attention like education. Lanham also compares the human attention to an economy, productivity, capital, etc.

In conclusion, Lanham’s overall message seems to connect well with our study on webcomics. Lanham describes that computers have words, text, images, colors, that are always moving and everywhere. Just like webcomics, the “digital expressive space” it has its attention-grabbing skills but also has the worst entertaining distractions. My webtoon “Cheese in the Trap” depicts this very well. My webcomic contains several attention- grabbing effects which is why it is very popular and has one of the highest ratings. It became so popular that it was adapted into a Korean drama. As Lanham says, the businesses, in this case artists, who best capture the attention of the public through effective packaging win!