In a July 28 Globe and Mail feature article, Erin Anderssen commented on Hollywood’s surging dalliance with the Christian market. One of the lead angles in her story was last fall’s Rocky Balboa publicity campaign, for which Christian media-personalities and high-profile ministers were targeted for sit-downs and conference calls with Sylvester Stallone. “On the [film’s promotional] website, several clergy -- including a nun -- also give star-struck video testimonials to the merits of the Rocky movies,” Anderssen wrote—and then followed up with quotes from yours truly.

“They actually sound like they’re giddy little school kids because they get to talk to Sylvester Stallone,” acknowledges Greg Wright... “It’s not that there’s really any strong spiritual message in the film. It’s the fact that they’re getting to talk to people they wouldn’t ordinarily get to talk to. It’s seductive.” Publicists, he points out, are bound to leverage celebrity power to sell their product, and clergy aren’t immune to that lure.

Aside from the fact that Anderssen cherry-picked the most provocative comments I made during our half-hour conversation, her article does press an interesting point: Can’t the Christian community see that it’s being used by Hollywood? And if it can, why does it go along with Hollywood so willingly?

It’s not a new topic, really—and I imagine that Anderssen tracked me down because I, among others, have been yakking about it publicly for some time now. Here at ThinkChristian, for instance, I broached the subject of the influence game in February, and followed that up in April with an article about the nuts and bolts of the publicity business.

Now, it seems, I’m long overdue with a follow-up—and answers to Anderssen’s questions: Yes, the Christian community knows what’s going on. And we go along with it all because we, like everyone else in our culture, are absolutely fascinated by the power wielded by Hollywood. But what’s undergirding that fascination today, more so than, say, fifty years ago?

The rise of the information age has played an enormous factor in our collective thinking. In 1971, at the dawn of Computer Science as a institutionalized field of study, one founding father of the discipline, Herbert Simon, observed that “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

So for those familiar with a supply-and-demand system of economics, the implication—from the early 1970s on—follows pretty directly: raw information itself becomes pretty cheap and meaningless; what becomes highly sought after and valuable is that wee bit of information which actually generates attention. And in the last thirty years, competition for our attention has ratcheted up incredibly, as has the amount of money people are willing to pay to get our attention.

This is a trend toward what is now called “the Attention Economy,” a formal economic and social theory articulated by Davenport and Beck in 2001—based on Simon’s prophetic observation and the explosion of the Internet at the end of the last century.

I first heard about the concept from a friend who attended a tech conference in Seattle which operated on the principle. Rather than the usual detailed program of workshop topics with scheduled presenters, start times, stop times, and locations, this conference operated purely on the principles of Attention Economy: anyone could lead a workshop, so long as you found a place to hang your shingle and managed to hold the attention of whatever audience happened to be passing by!

Madison Avenue’s application of the principle is not nearly so democratic. Think of the soaring cost of advertising during halftime of the Superbowl, and analyze the reasons for that development. Ask yourself: which professional sport, over the last thirty years, has most successfully cultivated and managed its product, its image, and its following in a bid to maximize its share of the limited time that folks have to devote to sporting events? And ask yourself: if there’s any one time of the year that you or your friends will deliberately sit down to watch televised commercial advertisements, when is that time? And you will realize that there is no more sterling example of how the Attention Economy functions.

Or think of what Google has accomplished through savvy application of Attention Economics. Just about every Internet company has a search engine, right? But Google gets used—and has become a verb, for goodness sake—because it managed to build a search engine that actually yields relevant results: it weeds out the things you don’t want to pay attention to, and connects you most quickly to the things you care about.

And now think again about that time spent with Sylvester Stallone last fall. Reflect, in fact, about the broader society and its love affair with Rocky. In the pages of Smithsonian’s February 2007 print edition is a photo of Stallone mugging with museum executives Dwight Bowers and Brent Glass—and they, too, look like giddy school kids (as much as one can while wearing a suit and tie). The occasion? “Actor-writer-director Sylvester Stallone has donated several franchise items to the Smithsonian Institution. Rocky Balboa’s black homburg hat, the crimson boxing robe he wore to fight Apollo Creed in the 1976 original, Rocky, a pair of boxing gloves and a pair of star-spangled shorts are now part of the ‘Treasures of American History’ exhibit.”

Treasures of American history? A fictional character’s star-spangled shorts? Yep. Ranks right up there with the first light bulb and the Declaration of Independence. We’ve come a long way from Madame Tussaud’s and Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. Hollywood has done about as well as the NFL in wrangling for its own chunk of the Attention Economy.

Even the Hollywood power brokers themselves get star-struck by the whole thing. August’s Rush Hour 3, for instance, features a sequence in which Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker fight the film’s baddies on the Eiffel Tower at night. One of the world’s most famous tourist attractions, the Tower tightly manages its image twenty-four hours a day—dictating when it can be lighted, and how. Because the only time that Rush Hour’s crew could film on and around the Tower was during the wee hours of the morning, the Tower’s normal routine sometimes ran afoul of filming.

“In one instance,” according to the film’s production notes, “when the timer-controlled tower lights went black as normally scheduled at 1:00 AM, a single phone call from the production’s Parisian locations department brought the lights back on.” Now, that’s influence. And how did director Brett Ratner feel about that? “I recognized that I was really a director at that point, if not King of the World.”

How do film directors acquire that kind of influence? The fact is, regardless of how much films cost to make, or how much boxoffice they generate, the dynamics of film distribution guarantees a much higher share of the public’s attention for each film than do the dynamics of other forms of media. Each year, fewer than four hundred films find their way into mainstream theaters. That’s why websites such as Past the Popcorn, which I manage with my wife, can cover nearly every new release. That’s why magazines such as Variety, Premiere, or Entertainment Weekly can thoroughly cover the film biz. Nobody can do the same for music, books, or even DVDs.

And when blockbusters like Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, or the Rocky franchise manage to corner a significant share of an already controlled, limited market, Attention has been arrested. People take notice.

So yes—the pastors and editors who gathered for a conference call with Sylvester Stallone last fall sounded like a bunch of giddy little school kids. Is that terribly surprising? Less than twelve months prior, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—another film promoted by Motive Entertainment, the same company pitching Rocky Balboa—was generating $745 million in worldwide boxoffice receipts.

And how much attention does that boxoffice take represent? About the equivalent of the $745 million that the entire religious book market generated in 2006. What market-minded pastor wouldn’t want to piggy-back on that kind of influence?

Want to win friends and influence the lost? Get on board the Attention Economy train, folks. Aspire to flip the switch on the Eiffel Tower. Get your ad placed during halftime of the Superbowl. Shake hands with Sly. Everyone else wants to.

The alternative, apparently, is getting lost in the shuffle.

Or is it? There’s no question that the dynamics of the Attention Economy are real, and that Christians in our culture are as subject to those dynamics as anyone else. But Madison Avenue’s, the NFL’s, and Hollywood’s tactics aren’t the only models out there.

There’s Google’s approach, too. How might the Church do a better job of weeding out the fluff—such as, dare I say it, face time with Sly—and delivering meaningful content? How can the Church become our culture’s preferred search engine? How do we—how can God and His Spirit, through us—transform Scripture from just another perceived worthless scrap of information into something that truly influences the world for good?