The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.22 (807 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01AEPSWB4 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 584 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-01-01 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention. One of the Best Books of the YearThe San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox * The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 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. 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. This condition is not simply the byproduct of
Wu wants to show us how our current conditions arose.” —The Washington Post “Dazzling. 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—getting other people to care about stuff that matters to you.” —Boing Boing “Engaging and informative. Wu dramatizes th
Mal Warwick said 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 insi. Andrew Montalenti said A good history of the advertising industry, rethought as the reaping and sowing of human attention through the ages. 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 har. Excellent read and recommended for anyone that wants to understand the modern world 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 is a policy advocate and professor at Columbia Law School. 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 t