The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our

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

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-winningÂ The Master SwitchÂ ( aÂ New YorkerÂ andÂ FortuneÂ Book of the Year) and who coined the term "net neutralityâ€â€”a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time.Â

Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 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.
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 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. Wuâ€™s narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new mediumâ€”from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebookâ€”has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of â€œattention merchantsâ€ 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.
Country USA
Manufacturer Vintage
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2016-10-18
UnitCount 1
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Vintage
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2016-10-18
UnitCount	1
Format	Kindle eBook

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

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