Fluff and Stuff

Lanham's notion of "stuff and fluff" in a way reflects Edward Bono's "lateral thinking." Lanham comments that it is important to reverse our thinking about commodities not in terms of physical components but also in terms of design of those components. It is in this sense that Lanham advocates to think outside of what is obvious or perceptible, as lateral thinking would have it.

Fluff, as we commonly understand is certainly not to be misunderstood in the context of new media. Fluff is the new media's economies of scale that determines a different kind of value than "exchange value." Lanham points out that we are "less and less constrained by material circumstance" (9), we oscillate between the foreground (the stuff) and the background (the fluff).

In the Information Age, the value of the product is therefore determined by the forces of both stuff and fluff. In other words, the value of a product is not only seen in terms of its tangibility but also in terms of its power of drawing attention. For instance, as Lanham describes, "the entire video game universe aims to make players into acute and swift economists of attention…the designer of these digital dramas is clearly an economist of attention, then, but so are the players. Parents may not need to worry so much about their children when they play video games. They may be training themselves for a new economy” (17).

In this debate of fluff and stuff Lanham proposes a new economic theory that seeks to define scarcity from the perspective of fluff rather than stuff, i.e. there is huge supply of product based on the demand but what is scarce is the ability to understand how the stuff is created. So we live in a society where we need to optimize our attention factor to really understand the value of the stuff. For Lanham, new media is the agency facilitating that optimization. It is the entry point for the new economy.

Thus, based on Lanham's assumption, I think one of the major characteristics of new media is to define not the product but its use. For instance, there may be twenty people possessing a new media artifact (fulfilling the classical economic demand-supply model) but out of these twenty only seven might actually define its use based on its conception rather than mere application. These seven people may be "attentive" enough to understand that the artifact is a function of complex of ideas that actually determine its value. Thus, our stuff is not what we "dig and grow" (as in the Agricultural Age) nor it is what we invent (as in the Industrial Age), but it is what we conceive.