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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.
“A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention…We’ve become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves.”
—Tom Vanderbilt, The New Republic
“An erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history…A devastating critique of ad tech as it stands today, transforming "don't be evil" into the surveillance business model in just a few short years. It connects the dots between the sale of advertising inventory in schools to the bizarre ecosystem of trackers, analyzers and machine-learning models that allow the things you look at on the web to look back at you…This stuff is my daily beat, and I learned a lot from Attention Merchants.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
“Illuminating.”
—Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review of Books
- Sales Rank: #8257 in Books
- Published on: 2016-10-18
- Released on: 2016-10-18
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.60" h x 1.20" w x 6.70" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 416 pages
Review
“Comprehensive and conscientious…Wu writes with elegance and clarity…[his] chapters about the early days of advertising are some of this book’s most enjoyable, easily serving as a reader’s companion to “Mad Men.” Mr. Wu concludes his book with a cri de coeur, imploring us to regain custody of our attention, written so rousingly that it just may make you reconsider your priorities.”
–Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
“Compelling…sharp…Wu [is] a skilled thinker…he applies the thesis of a business cycle to explain the development of the advertising market and the ways in which it has adapted to avoid our natural inclination to ignore it…Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect…a “Hidden Persuaders” for the 21st century, just as we stand squarely on the threshold of a post-broadcast world where the algorithmic nano-targeting of electronic media knows our desires and impulses before we know them ourselves.”
–Emily Bell, The New York Times Book Review
“A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention…We’ve become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves.”
—Tom Vanderbilt, The New Republic
“Illuminating.”
–Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review of Books
“Lively…An engrossing study of what we hate about commercial media…Vigorous and amusing, filled with details of colorful hucksterism and cunning attention-grabbing ploys along with revealing insights into the behavioral quirks they instill in us.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Part history and part social wake up call, this book is for everyone.”
—Library Journal
“Forget subliminal seduction: every day, we are openly bought and sold, as this provocative book shows.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Tim Wu has written a profoundly important book on a problem that doesn’t get enough— well, attention. Attention itself has become the currency of the information age, and, as Wu meticulously and eloquently demonstrates, we allow it to be bought and sold at our peril.”
–James Gleick, author of Time Travel: A History
“I couldn’t put this fascinating book down. Gripping from page one with its insight, vivid writing, and panoramic sweep, The Attention Merchants is also a book of urgent importance, revealing how our preeminent industries work to fleece our consciousness rather than help us cultivate it.”
–Amy Chua, Yale law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Triple Package
“Television entranced the masses. Digital media, more insidiously, mesmerizes each of us individually. In this revelatory book, Tim Wu tells the story of how advertisers and programmers came to seize control of our eyes and minds. The Attention Merchants deserves everyone’s attention.”
–Nicholas Carr, author of Utopia Is Creepy and The Shallows
“The question of how to get people to care about something important to you is central to religion, government, commerce, and the arts. For more than a century, America has experimented with buying and selling this attention, and Wu’s history of that experiment is nothing less than a history of the human condition and its discontents.”
–Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
About the Author
TIM WU is an author, policy advocate, and professor at Columbia University, best known for coining the term "net neutrality." In 2006, Scientific American named him one of 50 leaders in science and technology; in 2007, 01238 magazine listed him as one of Harvard's 100 most influential graduates; in 2013, National Law Journal included him in "America's 100 Most Influential Lawyers"; and in 2014 and 2015, he was named to the "Politico 50." He formerly wrote for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for Travel Journalism, and is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. In 2015, he was appointed to the Executive Staff of the Office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as a senior enforcement counsel and special adviser.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
The colorful story of advertising, well told
By Mal Warwick
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 wider net. Beginning with the advent of the penny press in the 1830s, he explores in telling detail the now centuries-long battle between the commercial interests who want to seize our attention for their own ends and the individuals who want to keep our lives private and access news, information, and entertainment without distraction. This is a colorful story, and Wu tells it well.
Though Wu opens with the introduction of the Sun in New York in 1833, his history more properly begins much later in the 19th century with the emergence of the advertising industry to sell Snake Oil and other patent medicines. (Yes, Snake Oil Liniment was actually a widely sold product Good for Man and Beast.) “From the 1890s thr0ugh the 1920s,” he writes, “there arose the first means for harvesting attention on a mass scale and directing it for commercial effect . . . [A]dvertising was the conversion engine that, with astonishing efficiency, turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity.”
The penny press, Amos ‘n Andy, and pop-up ads
Beginning in the early years of the 20th century, Wu frames his story around the development of radio and the four “screens” that have dominated our attention over the decades that followed: the “silver” screen (film), television, the personal computer, and the smartphone. The author relates the history of each of these technologies as a human story, describing the often outrageous personalities who pioneered and dominated each of these media in turn. However, in focusing on radio and the four screens, Wu overlooks the billboards that mar every urban line of sight and barely mentions the direct mail that floods our mailboxes. Though less than comprehensive, his historical account is engrossing and enlightening.
Here you’ll learn about the development of propaganda by the British government in World War I and its perfection by Nazi Germany . . . the first radio serial that was a smash hit (the grossly racist “Amos ‘n Andy“) in the 1920s . . . the invention of the soap opera in the 1930s . . . the battle between the networks on radio and later on TV from the 1930s through the 1990s . . . the development of geodemographic targeting for ads in the 1970s . . . the emergence of celebrity culture in the 1980s and its perversion by reality television in the 2000s . . . the wild proliferation of blogging in the 2000s . . . the identity theft committed by Google and Facebook in the 2000s and beyond . . . and, finally, “unplugging” and the emergence of free online streaming services like Netflix in the 2010s. This is not a pretty story.
A harsh judgment
The author is not a fan of the “new media” that have come to hold our attention in recent years. “The idealists had hoped the web would be different,” he notes, “and it certainly was for a time, but over the long term it would become something of a 99-cent store, if not an outright cesspool.” Similarly, Wu’s judgment about the advertising industry is harsh. “[U]nder competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative . . .” It’s difficult to find fault with any of this.
About the author
He’s the man who coined the term “network neutrality.” A specialist in media and technology, Tim Wu has written several books and numerous articles, all nonfiction. His work has influenced the development of national media policy under the Obama Administration.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting History--With A Surprisingly Conservative Message
By Charles
Tim Wu’s “The Attention Merchants” is part history and part social analysis. The history related in “The Attention Merchants” tells us something we all basically know—that economic forces simultaneously drive businesses to offer us “free” entertainment, while at the same time making our attention to that entertainment a product to be sold to advertisers. Hence the title. And, since everybody likes free stuff, and in a free market, new markets will always be sought and exploited, there is a natural tendency for advertising to intrude into previously private spaces, making the sphere of the truly private ever smaller.
Wu acknowledges that we get something for allowing our attention to be sold, which is why we agree to the exchange. This book is not a jeremiad against the free market; there is no implicit or explicit demand for less “free” in the “free market.” Nor is this a Larry Lessig-type call for more government control, always somehow tilted to benefit the Left, under the guise of pseudo-libertarianism (Lessig’s specialty—Lessig is all for less government control, as long as the result is calculated to deliver more power for the Left). Wu just thinks we should consider more deeply whether the bargain we each strike with the merchants is worth it.
“The Attention Merchants” follows the expanding sale of attention from the late 19th Century to Snapchat, tracing how technology makes capturing and selling attention ever easier, even though occasionally some segments of society resist. With television, intrusion into the private sphere expanded greatly. Then the 1960s and 1970s, a time of expressive individualism, resulted in even more advertising success—for the desire to be an individual “was a desire [the advertising] industry could cater to, just like any other.” And, as an advertising executive said at the time, “The hippies are in their peak acquisitive years, and their relative affluence enable them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level.” Not for Wu a starry-eyed belief in the virtue of the Age of Aquarius.
Of course, with the rise of the Internet and then of mobile devices, advertising intrusion into the private sphere has become nearly continuous for the vast majority of people. This intrusion today is both nearly constant and extremely finely tuned to the individual target using proven methods of grabbing and keeping attention. Wu decries this, but not as a preacher would, rather with the knowledge that for most people, they think this is a good deal, or they wouldn’t do it. (And he’s funny: “On Facebook, all happy families were alike; the others may have been unhappy in their own way, but they were not on Facebook.”) His call is for more consideration, and a more measured approach, by each of us.
This is not a book of economics. Wu touches briefly on academic discussions about advertising, and describes attention as a commodity, but does not involve himself in questions of whether advertising is in part deadweight loss, as claimed by some. I suppose he thought that would be too much of a departure, and he’s probably right, but I would have been interested to learn more about different views on the topic.
Wu also does not explore another avenue that I think would have been profitable to explore—the effect of class. He does not seem aware, or at least does not address, that his concerns are confined to the educated classes—namely, the type of people who read his book. The lower classes are not reflective, usually, in the way that Wu suggests we be, and they will not hear his call. If they did, they would probably reject it with the contempt shown to Luke Wilson’s character in “Idiocracy,” as yet another way the snobbish elites are trying to control them and lord it over them. The lower classes do not debate taking “Internet Sabbaths.” Steve Jobs strictly limited all forms of screen time for his children; the lower classes use, whether by necessity or choice, all forms of electronics, accompanied by constant advertising, as babysitters, for both children and grownups.
In fact, many of Wu’s suggestions would actually increase the class divide in America—yes, premium TV, which Wu identifies as part of a current (and probably temporary) “retreat and revolt,” has fewer advertisements, but it’s generally not consumed by the lower classes. In an interview in The Atlantic, Wu said “We have to get over our addiction to free stuff. Suck it up and pay.” This message only resonates with those who have money. Those with extra money may choose to spend it on limiting exposure to ads and increasing privacy, but those with little money will more likely choose the bargain of cheaper entertainment, or free entertainment, at the cost of more ads and less privacy. And let’s be honest—lack of reflection and self-control is a key characteristic of the lower classes, one reason they ARE the lower classes, so they are unlikely to instead read “Middlemarch.” That’s just the nature of human society, and the reality of human nature.
On a broader level, although Wu is left-liberal (he ran as a Democrat for Lieutenant Governor of New York) this book at first appears non-political. True, it’s sprinkled with references to New Left nonsense philosophers, from Habermas to Marcuse. They’re used for pithy quotes, though, not for their ideological claptrap. (It’s not at all clear Wu really grasps the actual ideology of the New Left, especially since he claims that they (and the “youth movement” of the late 1960s) “envisioned an end to all forms of repression,” which was “a more ambitious aim than anything hoped for even by Karl Marx and his followers, who simply sought liberation from an unfair economic system.” I suppose at some level that characterization of the New Left, Marx and Marxism is true, but it omits everything important. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”)
But as I say, these references to the Left are window dressing in what appears to be a non-political book. It is not non-political, though. In fact, “The Attention Merchants” is a deeply conservative book. Moreover, it is not conservative as “libertarian,” which is sometimes acceptable to our elites as long as the focus is increasing atomizing choice likely to lead to leftist goals like destruction of the family and traditional religious beliefs (again, think Larry Lessig). Rather the book is deeply culturally and socially conservative. I’m not sure if Wu realizes or would acknowledge this, but it is nonetheless true.
Why do I say is this a conservative book? First, Wu explicitly recognizes that the materialism that drives the sale of attention is a substitute for religious belief. Wu notes that as religious faith in the West has declined, “Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline.” This is a common conservative insight, but rarely seen on the Left, which generally believes that religion is inherently doomed, that disbelief does not result in reaching for substitutes, and that materialism is driven by malevolent capitalist forces, not by us.
Second, Wu shows constant skepticism towards government, especially because it is a source of and key user of propaganda. As he relates in detail, this has been true since as soon as propaganda became technologically feasible and Americans temperamentally less resistant to it, from Woodrow Wilson on. This propaganda, Wu emphasizes, is not just the crude emotional manipulation of Kitchener’s “I Want You.” Rather, it lies in corralling the thoughts of the masses into certain patterns. He quotes one mid-20th Century writer, “the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses toward certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses’ field of vision.” Admittedly this writer was Hitler, but we would call this today “setting the narrative”—not by rational exposition and discussion, but by emotional appeals under the guise of facts.
And such emotional appeals are all the Left offers today, although Wu does not say this and does not take the step to realize that such propaganda is today less a formal government activity and more a coordinated activity of the ruling cultural elite, led by people like George Soros. Modern left-liberal appeals, from gun control to Obamacare to Not Trump to unrestricted abortion, don’t make the mistake of engaging the complex merits of an issue, before, or after, engaging the listener (which is what makes propaganda fail, as Wu points out). Raw appeals to simplistic emotions characterize today’s entire program of the Left—it is conservatives, lacking the megaphone of the news-setting media that allows the Left to set the narrative to whatever is today’s Left focus, who have to lead with the complex merits of an issue.
Third, Wu is highly skeptical of easy solutions. His measured approach to every problem shows repeatedly that Wu has the “constrained vision” identified by Thomas Sowell as underlying the conservative approach to the world. He is skeptical of magic solutions that promise something for nothing, again in contravention to Left ideology (and in contradiction to every single New Left idol that he quotes). Wu simply does not buy into the standard Left belief that human nature and human society is perfectible; he is an incrementalist, which means he is fundamentally a conservative.
But these are small beans compared to the main reason why this is a conservative book. Wu’s solution to the social problems he identifies is, although he doesn’t use these words, a call for a cultural renewal along conservative lines. He notes that until recently, “custom,” “tradition,” and “religion” “used to define certain inviolable spaces and moments . . . . And while there was much about the old reality that could be inconvenient or frustrating, it had the advantage of automatically creating protected spaces, with their salutary effects.” Here is the spot where nearly any modern writer, a foot soldier in the Gramscian culture wars, would perform a ritual denunciation of supposedly endemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., that characterized the “old reality,” and apologize profusely for suggesting that something good might have existed then, even if the author nonetheless maintained that a tiny thread of virtue did exist that might have been lost. Not Wu. He just says nothing of the sort—in fact, calling the past “inconvenient” and “frustrating,” but nothing else, suggests a deliberate choice to reject sacrificing at the altars of the Left’s gods. He just makes his point and moves on.
Next he channels, for all practical purposes, the conservative writer Yuval Levin, noting that today’s unprecedented individualism is both good and bad, but “What is called for might be termed a human reclamation project.” He calls for us to become like “the monastics, whether in the East or the West, whose aim was precisely to reap the fruits of deep and concentrated attention.” In essence, Wu calls for us to seek the Good. “At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived.” He calls for us to “desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture.” No different than Aristotle or Abelard, he notes that the Good is not obtained from passive acceptance of a barrage of materialist demands, but from a spiritual focus on obtaining something objectively good.
Along the same lines, Wu makes the extremely conservative point that man seeks above all transcendence, or meaning, and we obtain only false transcendence from accepting as key to our being the wares paraded before us by the attention merchants. As Wu says of Apple and other companies to whom brand loyalty and identity is critical: “What is offered to adherents is not merely a good product (though often it is), but something deeper and more deeply fulfilling—a sense of meaning that comes with the surrender of choice.” But true meaning cannot be obtained through this mechanism, only false meaning. That Wu, even implicitly, distinguishes between true meaning, that leads man to the Good, and false meaning, makes him deeply conservative.
In fact, Wu’s plan dovetails precisely with the plans advanced by conservative thinkers, such as Rod Dreher and Roger Scruton, to take back culture as part of an active plan of resistance to, and perhaps ultimate victory over, the New Left. A key part of that resistance is rebuilding intermediary institutions in which we actively participate, and, as Scruton says, “under whose auspices people can flourish according to their social nature, acquiring the manners and aspirations that endow their lives with meaning.” These institutions are the opposite not only of government social control, but also of the passive acceptance of commercial messages and the granting to those messages of control both over our private lives and, even, the meaning of our lives. Or as Scruton also says of consumerization, “The fact is we know the solution, and it is not a political one. We must change our lives. And to do this we need spiritual authority, the ability to make sacrifices, and a refusal to be degraded into the machines désirantes of Deleuze and Guattari.” That sentence would fit seamlessly into Wu’s book.
Now, it’s true that Wu effectively writes not only in opposition to left-liberals, but also in opposition to Chamber of Commerce Republicans, who think that the unfettered free market is inherently productive of the Good and refuse to recognize that powerful forces of social atomism necessarily result from the free market. Conservatism is much more fragmented than it once was. It’s not like Wu is going to be speaking at the next Republican National Convention. But his straightforward analysis and original thought is both very interesting and clarifying, and people of any political bent can benefit from reading his book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Great Read
By Old Observer
Writing histories of soft power – advertising, entertainment, persuasion, etc – has its difficulties. The historians of the hard variety of power can attach their arguments to a battle won, a piece of legislation passed, an election lost, something concrete where impact and significance seem clearer, more obvious. Yet the exercise of soft power is both commonplace and important because it often does shape our lives in a myriad of ways. But how do you prove such claims?
Well Tim Wu has done a masterful job of tracking the story of a changing group of people, mostly men, who have sort to harvest the attention of publics and then sell that attention to a bevy of clients, mostly advertisers of one kind or another. The overall story isn’t new: there have been many fine histories of advertising over the years, and of its effect on culture and consumers. But Wu adds to the chronicle by focusing much of his argument on the modern incarnation of the attention merchants, no longer just newspaper publishers or admen or broadcast moguls but the ones who run the massively popular websites, say a Mark Zuckerberg, that wins our attention by offering an appealing service, a lot of supposedly ‘free stuff.’ Except of course it isn’t quite free, or rather it produces a saleable product, our eyes, that can generate huge profits. And the success of such enterprise shapes the whole character of the internet, just like the fact of advertising shaped first newspapers, then radio, and finally television news and entertainment.
It’s the details of the story that especially intrigue. Thus I was taken by his bio of someone he calls the alchemist, Claude Hopkins, an adman early in the 20th century, whose successes and views had a major impact on the course of marketing throughout the next few decades. Wu has obviously done much research and thought hard about his findings. He writes well, very well indeed: the story flows easily, the arguments are clear, and his claims are always interesting, even if you might doubt his conclusions. So his suggestion a consumer revolt is brewing nowadays I liked, and hope he’s correct, but I doubt – there have been too many such claims in times past but we still live in marketing’s moment. Things change yes, styles of persuasion get updated, but the rule of the persuader persists: so the political consultant may have suffered some hard times in the past election cycle (because so many expensive campaigns failed abysmally), but the triumph of Trump (who doesn’t figure in the book) shows the huckster remains a potent figure in the American mix.
The characters I found most intriguing here, like Hopkins, weren’t just selling our attention but manufacturing attraction, making products or people or causes appealing to the various markets and publics. Because in part our attention to the free stuff doesn’t mean our submission to the wishes of the elites. There’s another step, namely the crafting of the brand or the cause, making something that captivates or, apparently, fills a need. In short the real exercise of soft power came through the efforts of the adman, although now more the ad-maker and public relations counsel, what’s been called the persuasion industry. Sometimes I had the feeling Wu’s approach emphasized attention too much, attraction too little.
But the real point is that Wu’s book provokes thought about a brand of soft power that is both ubiquitous and compelling. The only answer, unfortunately inadequate I think, is to get off the grid – don’t Facebook, don’t tweet, don’t watch television, then you can’t be sold. Except, of course, you then miss out on the free stuff.
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