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

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

by Tim Wu
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

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

by Tim Wu

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

From the author of the award-winning The Master Switch, 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. 

"Dazzling." —Financial Times

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

ISBN-13: 9780804170048
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 09/19/2017
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 432
Sales rank: 312,564
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

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.

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

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