****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.
