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

by Tim Wu

Overview

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.
 
Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few moments or spaces of our day remain uncultivated by the "attention merchants," contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that 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. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebrity power brands like Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, the basic business model of "attention merchants" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against the relentless siege of our awareness, from the remote control to the creation of public broadcasting to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants are always growing new heads, even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature—cognitive, social, political and otherwise—in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.
 
“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.”
—Tom Vanderbilt, The New Republic
 
“An erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history…A devastating critique of ad tech as it stands today, transforming "don't be evil" into the surveillance business model in just a few short years. It connects the dots between the sale of advertising inventory in schools to the bizarre ecosystem of trackers, analyzers and machine-learning models that allow the things you look at on the web to look back at you…This stuff is my daily beat, and I learned a lot from Attention Merchants.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing 

“Illuminating.”
—Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review of Books 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385352017
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/18/2016
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

TIM WU is an author, policy advocate, and professor at Columbia University, best known for coining the term "net neutrality." In 2006, Scientific American named him one of 50 leaders in science and technology; in 2007, 01238 magazine listed him as one of Harvard's 100 most influential graduates; in 2013, National Law Journal included him in "America's 100 Most Influential Lawyers"; and in 2014 and 2015, he was named to the "Politico 50." He formerly wrote for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for Travel Journalism, and is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. In 2015, he was appointed to the Executive Staff of the Office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as a senior enforcement counsel and special adviser.

Table of Contents

Introduction Here's the Deal 3

Part I Masters of Blazing Modernities

Chapter 1 The First Attention Metchants 11

Chapter 2 The Alchemist 24

Chapter 3 For King and Country 37

Chapter 4 Demand Engineering, Scientific Advertising, and What Women Want 51

Chapter 5 A Long Lucky Run 65

Chapter 6 Not with a Bang but with a Whimper 73

Part II The Conquest of Time and Space

Chapter 7 The Invention of Prime Time 85

Chapter 8 The Prince 95

Chapter 9 Total Attention Control, or The Madness of Crowds 108

Chapter 10 Peak Attention, American Style 123

Chapter 11 Prelude to an Attentional Revolt 144

Chapter 12 The Great Refusal 151

Chapter 13 Coda to an Attentional Revolution 170

Part III The Third Screen

Chapter 14 Email and the Power of the Check-in 183

Chapter 15 Invaders 191

Chapter 16 AOL Pulls'Em In 198

Part IV The Importance of Being Famous

Chapter 17 Establishment of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex 217

Chapter 18 The Oprah Model 227

Chapter 19 The Panopticon 237

Part V Won't Be Fooled Again

Chapter 20 The Kingdom of Content: This Is How You Do It 255

Chapter 21 Here Comes Everyone 267

Chapter 22 The Rise of Clickbait 276

Chapter 23 The Place to Be 289

Chapter 24 The Importance of Being Microfamous 303

Chapter 25 The Fourth Screen and the Mirror of Narcissus 308

Chapter 26 The Web Hits Bottom 318

Chapter 27 A Retreat and a Revolt 328

Chapter 28 Who's Boss Here? 335

Chapter 29 An Absorbing Spectacle: The Attention Merchant Turned President 340

Epilogue The Human Reclamation Project 348

Acknowledgments 355

Notes 357

Index 397

Editorial Reviews

What Wu achieved with his first book, The Master Switch, was to demystify the recent history of the ownership and governance of our communications systems…while identifying how open systems over time became compromised and closed. In The Attention Merchants he applies the same thesis of a business cycle to explain the development of the advertising market and the ways in which it has adapted to avoid our natural inclination to ignore it…When Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, the revelatory 1957 book about advertising's hidden psychological manipulations, he did so just as the mass media stood at a turning point. He did not stop the march of commercial television, but he provided a powerful critical framework through which to think about it. Wu has written a Hidden Persuaders for the 21st century, just as we stand squarely on the threshold of a post-broadcast world where the algorithmic nano-targeting of electronic media knows our desires and impulses before we know them ourselves.

The New York Times Book Review - Emily Bell

…because The Attention Merchants is comprehensive and conscientious, readers are bound to stumble on ideas and episodes of media history that they knew little about. Mr. Wu…writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet. As a lawyer and star professor at Columbia Law School…he is clearly in the habit of laying out his arguments in logical, progressive steps…Mr. Wu's chapters about the early days of advertising are some of this book's most enjoyable, easily serving as a reader's companion to Mad Men…But it's the last third of The Attention Merchants, in which Mr. Wu charts the rise and fall of the utopian internet, that is truly memorable.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

08/08/2016
Business is always trying to get our attention—and perhaps our souls—according to this lively if sometimes overwrought history of advertiser-sponsored media. Columbia law professor and net-neutrality advocate Wu (The Master Switch) takes readers from the 19th-century dawn of New York’s penny press, when media moguls first realized that the attention of readers was their “product” and advertisers their customers, through the propaganda of wartime Britain and Nazi Germany, the advent of television’s mesmeric power, and ultimately the current onslaught of garish pop-ups and click-bait junk-journalism fighting to hijack our eyeballs on the Internet. Wu’s critique of the Kardashianized spiritual malaise of our society of the spectacle—“We are at risk of being not merely informed but manipulated and even deceived by ads... of living lives that are less fully our own than we imagine,” he groans—feels old hat; the real problem seems to be simply how to prune back ads that have grown too invasive and annoying. Fortunately, his history is usually vigorous and amusing, filled with details of colorful hucksterism and cunning attention-grabbing ploys along with revealing insights into the behavioral quirks they instill in us. The result is an engrossing study of what we hate about commercial media. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

09/15/2016
The nature of our lives is at stake, claims Wu (Isidor & Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Univ. Law Sch.; The Master Switch) as he looks at how advertising has shaped people's lives. In 1833, Benjamin Day started selling broadsheets for a penny in New York City. His profit was not in the price of the newspaper, but rather in what he could charge for readers' attention, which for Day was the real "product" being sold. Wu shows how this trend continued through the advent of the first screen (movies), second screen (television), third screen (computers), and most recently the fourth screen (smartphones and wearable technology). From snake oil to Netflix, the author follows the rise of advertising, the shifts in technique, and the public response. Propaganda as advertising, "demand engineering" (creating the desire for merchandise that otherwise wouldn't exist), brand loyalty, targeted ads, and item placement are all touched upon. Wu further argues that consumer revolts have arisen before but never totally succeeded. His goal is for readers to be aware of how much attention they are giving away to others. VERDICT Part history and part social wake up call, this book is for everyone.—Bonnie A. Tollefson, Rogue Valley Manor Lib., Medford, OR

Library Journal

2016-08-02
When something online is free, then the product being sold is you. Wu (Columbia Law School; The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, 2010) elaborates on that sobering note.Think of this next time you’re browsing social media and a targeted ad goes floating by: how do they know to send that ad your way? The answer lies in the fact that there are legions of humans, and behind them busy bots and vast databanks, trying to get inside your head, determine your wishes and tastes, and, more than anything else, capture your attention. Wu opens his learned, skillfully delivered treatise by pointing to a phenomenon that ought to trouble anyone with a soul, namely, the selling of ads on school marquees, sports fields, and the like to fund school activities. The school board that approved the first such deal, Wu notes, realized that it “was holding an asset more lucrative than any bake sale”—namely, the students themselves, a captive audience almost by definition. But it goes deeper than that. As the author writes, every time we go online, we’re being tracked and monitored, ambushes being laid at every click. One of the most interesting passages is his account of “clickbait,” the villains of the piece, mild-mannered ad people, a brilliant MIT–trained scientist, and the Huffington Post, among others. The result is an all-out assault on our attention, as the “microfamous” fill our eyes and ears and the merchants work ever harder to pull down the wall between advertising and actual content. Wu closes this broad-ranging but closely argued argument by noting that given that our lives are what we pay attention to, we are now obliged to “defend the sheer reach of the attention merchant into the entirety of our lived experience.” Indeed, and it involves more than simply turning off the TV—though that’s a start. Forget subliminal seduction: every day, we are openly bought and sold, as this provocative book shows.

Kirkus Review

One of the Best Books of the Year
The San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox * The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“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

From the Publisher

Organized as a satisfying history of advertising and marketing, this audio is also a philosophical look at who tries to co-opt our attention and how we’ve resisted each new intrusion into our lives. Marc Cashman narrates with an effective combination of measured enthusiasm and thoughtful engagement with these ideas. His diction and phrasing are pleasing, and his energy connects well with the historical arcs and themes in the book. Tim Wu uses today’s pervasive data collection of our Internet behavior and other examples to illuminate the divide between our being effective stewards of our own attention as compared to mindlessly responding to commercial and political messaging. With Cashman’s performance making every idea and theme comprehensible, this is a fascinating and well-documented look at the rapidly accelerating tension between individual intention and organizational interests. T.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile

Organized as a satisfying history of advertising and marketing, this audio is also a philosophical look at who tries to co-opt our attention and how we’ve resisted each new intrusion into our lives. Marc Cashman narrates with an effective combination of measured enthusiasm and thoughtful engagement with these ideas. His diction and phrasing are pleasing, and his energy connects well with the historical arcs and themes in the book. Tim Wu uses today’s pervasive data collection of our Internet behavior and other examples to illuminate the divide between our being effective stewards of our own attention as compared to mindlessly responding to commercial and political messaging. With Cashman’s performance making every idea and theme comprehensible, this is a fascinating and well-documented look at the rapidly accelerating tension between individual intention and organizational interests. T.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile