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

Amazon.com Price:  $11.24 (as of 12/05/2019 17:08 PST- Details)

Description

One of the Best Books of the Year
The San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox * The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

From Tim Wu, creator 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 frequently known as an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has grow to be the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we are facing a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention.
            This condition isn’t simply the byproduct of contemporary technological innovations but the results 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 will no longer manage to pay for to accept at face value.

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