The Attention Merchants
Click to look inside
World of Books
The feel-good place to buy books
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
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.
Tim Wu is a policy advocate, a Columbia Law School professor, and a New York Times contributing opinion writer. He is credited with coining the term net neutrality. He worked on competition policy at the Obama White House and the Federal Trade Commission, was a senior enforcement counsel at the New York Attorney General's Office, and clerked for Judge Stephen Breyer at the Supreme Court. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires and The Attention Merchants: The Epic Race to Get Into Our Minds are two of his earlier books.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780804170048 |
| ISBN 10 | 0804170045 |
| Title | The Attention Merchants |
| Author | Tim Wu |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2017-09-19 |
| Number of pages | 432 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |