The Attention Merchants

Tim Wu's engrossing, alarming book charts the history of how human attention has been exploited for money. According to Wu, a Columbia Law School professor, the process really began in the 1830s, when local newspapers realized that they could inflate their profits by lowering their cover price, thereby driving up circulation, and selling their readers' attention to advertisers.. Attention, Wu suggest, had become a commodity, and it has been systematically harvested ever since. Governments soon got in on the act. Britain launched the first mass propaganda campaign in history with its First World War recruitment poster. Hitler, however, soon discredited the whole enterprise of state propaganda; and since the mid 30th-century, the tools of attention grabbing have largely been in private hands. Wu, who writes with narrative flair and an eye for the most telling examples is certainly no admirer of the admen. Though he mostly keeps his skepticism in check, the gloves finally come off in an epilogue that argues advertising has profaned our lives.

The rise of the attention merchants hasn't always been smooth. Occasionally, people revolt, IN the 1930s, a consumer movement forced the US government to start policing ads for factual inaccuracies. The remote control, a 1950s invention, was meant to hail a new resistance by giving TV watchers the power to press mute. Yet, as Wu shows, advertising has always adapted to resistance extremely well. It has co-opted any and all countercultures, from hippies to punks, and it has recruited many of its greatest haters into its ranks. Bother Google and Facebook, for example, were founded by engineer who despised online ads. And so set about creating better ones.

Wu is especially vexed by our great migration to the web. He claims that thanks to Google and social media, he calls Facebook Mark Zuckerberg's attention plantation, we are living in the definitive dystopic vision of later modernity. But while his range is engaging, it also hints at an unpleasant disdain for ordinary behaviour. It doesn't seem to occur to him, for instance, that the clickbait stories published by The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed may be ones that people happily choose to read. As a result, though this book poses important question, by the time Wu get to them, he may well have lost his readers attention.