The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
Tim Wu
(Author)
Description
One of the Best Books of the YearThe San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox * The Globe and Mail (Toronto) From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term net neutrality"--a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time.
Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention.
This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. Wu's narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new medium--from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook--has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of "attention merchants" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.
Product Details
Price
$17.00
$15.64
Publisher
Vintage
Publish Date
September 19, 2017
Pages
432
Dimensions
5.2 X 8.0 X 1.0 inches | 0.9 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780804170048
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Tim Wu is a policy advocate and professor at Columbia Law School. In 2006, Scientific American named him one of fifty leaders in science and technology; in 2013, National Law Journal included him among "America's 100 Most Influential Lawyers"; and in 2014 and 2015, he was named to the "Politico 50." He won the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for travel journalism and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. http: //www.timwu.org
Reviews
"Vigorous, entertaining. . . . Wu describes how the rise of electronic media established human attention as perhaps the world's most valuable commodity." --The Boston Globe "The Attention Merchants is a book of our time, touching on an emerging strain of anxiety about the information age. . . . A bracing intellectual tour de force." --The San Francisco Chronicle
"Comprehensive and conscientious, readers are bound to stumble on ideas and episodes of media history that they knew little about. [Wu] writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet." --The New York Times "A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention. . . . We've become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves." --The New Republic "The book is studded with sharp illustrations of those who have tried to stop the encroachment of advertising on our lives, and usually failed. . . . Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect." --The New York Times Book Review "An engaging history of the attention economy. . . . [Wu] wants to show us how our current conditions arose." --The Washington Post
"Dazzling. . . . [Wu] could hardly have chosen a better time to publish a history of attention-grabbing. . . . He traces a sustained march of marketers further into our lives." --The Financial Times " [An] erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history of one of humanity's core undertakings--getting other people to care about stuff that matters to you." --Boing Boing
"Engaging and informative. . . . [Wu's] account . . . is a must-read." --The Washington Times
"Comprehensive and conscientious, readers are bound to stumble on ideas and episodes of media history that they knew little about. [Wu] writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet." --The New York Times "A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention. . . . We've become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves." --The New Republic "The book is studded with sharp illustrations of those who have tried to stop the encroachment of advertising on our lives, and usually failed. . . . Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect." --The New York Times Book Review "An engaging history of the attention economy. . . . [Wu] wants to show us how our current conditions arose." --The Washington Post
"Dazzling. . . . [Wu] could hardly have chosen a better time to publish a history of attention-grabbing. . . . He traces a sustained march of marketers further into our lives." --The Financial Times " [An] erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history of one of humanity's core undertakings--getting other people to care about stuff that matters to you." --Boing Boing
"Engaging and informative. . . . [Wu's] account . . . is a must-read." --The Washington Times
