RECOMMENDED BOOK
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
RECOMMENDED
by Tim Wu
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.
Categories: Evolutionary Perspective, Further ReadingOne of the Best Books of the Year
The San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox * The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
- All Books by Section
- Book Reports from Our Contributors (42)
- Books Referenced in Human Journey Sections:
- Journey of the Human Mind (7)
- Discovering Our Distant Ancestors (34)
- The Evolution of Language (18)
- Ideas that Shaped Our Modern World (117)
- Tools and the Development of Contemporary Society (33)
- A Sustainable Planet (25)
- The Changing World Economy (34)
- Health and Education in the Modern World (34)
- Our Mind in the Modern World (24)