‘The Attention Merchants’ Reveals Commercial Exploitation

Tim Wu begins his timely new book, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, by pointing out a fact that many of us have probably long forgotten: “There was a time when, whether by convention or technological limitations, many parts of life — home, school, and social interaction among them — were sanctuaries, sheltered from advertising and commerce.”

Anyone with a smartphone or a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube account now knows that there is virtually no sanctuary from a constant barrage of headlines, images, commercial pitches, and pleas designed to grab one’s attention and that millions of us voluntarily relinquish our privacy.

Wu places efforts to seize the attention of the masses in context by looking back to the daily newspapers of 19th-century New York and from there to the advent of radio and television, video games, the Internet, and the explosion of social media that seems now as natural as sunlight.