The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
Written by Tim Wu
Narrated by Marc Cashman
4/5
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Currently unavailable
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About this audiobook
From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and 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.
Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few moments or spaces of our day remain uncultivated by the "attention merchants," contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that 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. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebrity power brands like Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, the basic business model of "attention merchants" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against the relentless siege of our awareness, from the remote control to the creation of public broadcasting to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants are always growing new heads, even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature--cognitive, social, political and otherwise--in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.
Tim Wu
Tim Wu is Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School. He served as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy under the Biden administration, worked on competition policy in the Obama White House and the Federal Trade Commission, and served as senior enforcement counsel at the New York Office of the Attorney General. The author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, he lives in New York City.
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Reviews for The Attention Merchants
77 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Basically a history of advertising, this saga of those who want to grab our attention for their own interests was a good summary, taking us all the way from patent medicine salesmen to the current media.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Wu seems to have taken the lazy road when writing his second book--it's just a not very stimulating, although fairly informative, history of advertising and public relations. Although he refers to his first book throughout this one, Wu nods to the right sources and all that, but he ventures no new insights or ideas and he is rather spotty, surprisingly, on the use of new media in advertising.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book is basically a history of advertising...from the time of snake oil salesmen to the early days of newspapers, through to radio, television and the internet. It looks at how advertisers and marketers have learned to use various media to capture our attention so that they can inform and persuade us. I did find it interesting, but I didn't gain any new insights and was annoyed at how many times the author quoted his previous book!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/541. The Attention Merchants : The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (audio) by Tim Wureader: Marc Cashmanpublished: 2016format: 15:26 Overdrive Audiobook (~428 pages)acquired: Librarylistened: Apr 15-27, Jul 19-26rating: 4When you listen to half a book in April, then the rest in July, then immediately leave town for two weeks, then sit down for a review, you're first thought might be something like, what was the book about again?So, in the discombobulated and scattered pieces of my recent memory, I can confidently say this was a pretty fun history of advertising. Wu really begins with the early news papers, especially the ones in the early 1800's that hit on the idea that they could make more money from advertising then from sales of papers, and therefore they should strive to get as many readers as possible, even if they just gave the papers away. Perhaps you notice a reflection of our current mindset there. Wu moves forward through patent medicine, England PR for support in WWI which inspired Nazi PR ideas, to some oddball country listening to Amos and Andy blackface on the radio, and watching, en mass, I Love Lucy on TV and so on. I had the impression of a theme through AOL email and chat rooms, and a little aside on how The Drudge Report started internet brainwashing, but by Google, the Blackberry (he skips the iPod/iPhone), and Facebook it felt a little more like a book report padded on...or maybe that three months waiting to renew confused me.So, fun, of value and perfect for those who like nonfiction audiobooks.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very accurate and relevant, we need to question ourselves for the future if our attention.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A highly readable and entertaining introduction to and history of the advertising industry and its progressive penetration of our time and mental space, as well as the periodic public revulsion against it (we're losing).
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learned an awful lot reading it.
Fantastic summary of the history of advertising seamlessly extending into the present and explaining some of the insanity of the current situation. Unfortunately due to how short it is it has to be very selective and skips over a lot really interesting topics (rise of shopping channels, personal PR) and the present is early 2000s and doesn't include any of the unorthodox advertising methods taking advantage of networks and decentralisation. Given all this research the author did I expected him to hazard a guess as to where advertising will go now.