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.
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• Business & MoneyIndustriesMedia & Communications
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• Publication Date: October 18, 2016
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 533 Pages
• File Size: 53 KB