The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
416The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
416Hardcover
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Overview
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 naturecognitive, social, political and otherwisein 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 |
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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
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