The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.69 (509 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0804170045 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 432 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-09-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
“Vigorous, entertaining. Wu writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet.” —The New York Times “A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention. Wu’s account is a must-read.” —The Washington Times. He traces a sustained march of marketers further into our lives.” —The Financial Times “ An erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history of one of humanity's core undertakings—
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 Ne
The colorful story of advertising, well told If you’ve been paying attention, you can’t have missed the changes in the character of advertising over the course of your life. Certainly, I have. Chances are, you were born in the age of radio, at the earliest. If so, you’ve witnessed a string of new technologies enter the realm of news and entertainment, almost always paired with aggressive advertising sooner or later: network television, cable TV, the personal computer, the Internet, and the smartphone.In his insightful history of the business of advertising, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu casts a wide. "A good history of the advertising industry, rethought as the reaping and sowing of human attention through the ages" according to Andrew Montalenti. This was an excellent history of the advertising industry, with lots of thought-provoking historical analogs and anecdotes. It's a good follow-up to Tim Wu's earlier book, The Master Switch, that focuses on technology monopolies. The basic thrust of the book is that ever since the days of the earliest printing presses, there was a realization that the real money to be made from content was around harvesting "user attention". Through the 1800s and 1900s, the exact mechanisms used to harvest attention (newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television stations, and, eventually, the Int. "Excellent read and recommended for anyone that wants to understand the modern world" according to Geezer Geek. This book is well written with copious notes and insightful explanations of the degree to which propaganda and advertising (a commercial version) has taken over the public's attention. What we see on our televisions and on the internet is a never ending stream of attempts to have us think in a particular way or buy products that we often either don't need or are detrimental to our well being. Worse, its overpowering and heightens anxiety at a time when we have a lot to be anxious about.Tim Wu has done his fellow citizens and others a favor by writing this high quality book.
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. Wu’s narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. 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. This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the