The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads - Softcover

Wu, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804170045 ISBN 13: 9780804170048

Publisher: Vintage, 2017

Synopsis

One of the Best Books of the Year
The 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.

About this title

Review

"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

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0804170045
• ISBN 13: 9780804170048
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 432