Review by Choice Review
An early lesson in many marketing classes explains why free television is free and why newspapers are relatively inexpensive. The purchase, students learn, is not truly a TV show or newspaper. What is truly sold is the attention of the viewer or reader, and the buyer is the advertiser whose purchase of time and space subsidizes the medium. Attention merchants, Wu writes, succeed in "harvesting human attention and reselling it to advertisers.... " As media proliferate, the attention of the content user is strained, despite the greater control flipping from one channel, page, or app to another offers. Wu (Columbia Law) has also written or coauthored The Master Switch (CH, Apr'11, 48-4604) and Who Controls the Internet (CH, Jan'07, 44-2671) and is known for his development of the concept of net neutrality. In this book, Wu offers a deep, thorough exploration of the concept of gathering and reselling attention, from the earliest advertisements through the immersion of today's students in corporate-sponsored schools. Contemporary concepts such as click bait and the ubiquity of smartphones are also covered. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --David Aron, Dominican University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
WE DON'T USUALLY think of Timothy Leary as a consumer advocate, but in his zealous promotion of LSD, the iconoclastic 1960s psychologist was searching for what today we would call an ad blocker - though his tiny tabs relied more on messing with our sensory receptors than dropping code on our mobile phones. In his new book "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads," Tim Wu reminds us that Leary pushed acid in the pursuit of "a complete attentional revolution" in which his followers would reject the growing external stimuli of commercial media in favor of an inward, spiritual journey. It's more than a bit ironic, then, that Leary felt compelled to resort to a classic marketing trick, the jingle, to press his case. His "Turn on, tune in, drop out" was so catchy that, though failing to smash the attention economy, it was ultimately complicit in contributing to it, showing up in a campaign for Squirt, a grapefruit-flavored soda: "Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and drop out of the cola rut." This gets at the heart of the compelling thesis of "The Attention Merchants," namely that the age of mass media and mass marketing is characterized by an arms race between those who seek to capture the valuable commodity of our attention and capitalize on it for gain and those who resist this harvesting of time either through drugs; regulation; or most effectively, collective boredom, distraction and indifference. Wu's argument is that each boom in commercial media in some way went too far and provoked an either minor or major revolt, pushing the advertising industry to adopt more sophisticated or extreme methods to monetize our time. Drawing a line from the snake oil salesmen of the early 20 th century, through the birth, rise and decline of broadcast to the "attention plantation" of Facebook, Wu's history also illustrates the cyclical resistance movements against advertising. First came the unscrupulous false advertising, then the corrective of investigative journalism; first the tidal bore of broadcast television, then the corrective of the remote control; first the era of spam, then the development of filters and blockers. The book is studded with sharp illustrations of those who have tried to stop the encroachment of advertising on our lives, and usually failed. In the 1930s, for example, Rexford Tugwell, an economist and member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, sought to introduce far stricter legislation on drug advertising, which would have barred pharmaceutical and cigarette industries from making false claims about their products. The pressure brought by manufacturers on broadcasters to resist the proposed legislation saw both Tugwell's recommendations watered down and Tugwell himself smeared as a Communist. Newspapers and radio barely covered the controversy, in part, Wu writes, as a response to pressure from advertisers. THIS STRUGGLE HAS only become more relevant today. Many media companies, including The New York Times, are now almost entirely dependent on the ability to build and sustain a business model that captures people's time and resells it to advertisers, or provides something so valuable to individuals that they will pay for the journalism, programming or experience they receive. If you walk the floor of a modern newsroom, you will most likely see journalists staring at real-time charts flickering with numbers, and dials telling editors where readers are spending every second of their time. If you have got this far in the review, then I and Tim Wu are doing well - around 55 percent of readers, on average, will have stopped after 15 seconds. There is little sign of this trend slowing, only accelerating. Facebook and Google represent the largest and most successful advertising- funded businesses in history. They are busy developing technologies that track not only our attention but also every aspect of our online behavior and, in Facebook's case, synthesizing it with what is known as our "social graph." That graph is the circle of colleagues, acquaintances, families and friends we connect with online and determines as a result what type of advertising and even what type of news or other content we see. We are largely unaware of how the hidden tracking technologies operate and are complicit in how much we surrender. From his historical perspective, Wu can see that often a moment such as this one, in which our eyeballs are so thoroughly monopolized, is followed by resistance. But his concern is that we have not individually or collectively paid enough attention to the commercialization of every part of our lives: "Our society has been woefully negligent about what in other contexts we would call the rules of zoning, the regulation of commercial activity where we live, figuratively and literally. It is a question that goes to the heart of how we value what used to be called our private lives." Clearly not a fan of the selfie stick or the culture of "microfame," Wu sees a tendency to self-aggrandize online, turning us all into miniature attention merchants. As the man who coined the term "net neutrality" and a skilled thinker about the importance of an open web, Wu is nevertheless largely disappointed about where the internet has taken us. In a chapter titled "The Web Hits Bottom" he describes in some detail the business model of the new-media company Buzz-Feed and the quest for "virality." Wu is steadfastly skeptical, seeing "little to admire" online. Though he briefly describes "bright spots" like Wikipedia and Reddit and name-checks online legacy media that he grudgingly admits have improved their offerings, he sees them as being "engulfed by the vast areas of darkness, the lands of the cajoling listicles and the celebrity nonstories, engineered for no purpose but to keep a public mindlessly clicking and sharing away." What his thesis doesn't allow for is the possibility that despite his skepticism, we may have become rather deft in developing our own spam filters and that while the "open web" has in fact delivered a lot of cats falling over, it has also given us access to more knowledge than ever before and more engaging forms of information. It has done this in part because of the possibility of advertising revenue, not despite it. As for his dismissiveness about our "selfie" culture, he never considers the opportunities that the internet has opened up for women, minorities and those outside the mainstream media's boundaries of acceptability to take control of their own image. FOR SOMEONE UNIQUELY skilled at advocating a stronger regulatory climate, Wu's ultimate point is surprisingly low-tech: "If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have." It might be an idealistic aspiration, but it is a timely one. What Wu achieved with his first book, "The Master Switch," was to demystify the recent history of the ownership and governance of our communications systems, from telecom companies to the web, while identifying how open systems over time became compromised and closed. In "The Attention Merchants" he applies the same 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. Despite the book's occasional finger-wagging, Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect. When Vance Packard wrote "The Hidden Persuaders," the revelatory 1957 book about advertising's hidden psychological manipulations, he did so just as the mass media stood at a turning point. He did not stop the march of commercial television, but he provided a powerful critical framework through which to think about it. Wu has written 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 is the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Acclaimed Columbia University law professor Wu (The Master Switch, 2010), who popularized the concept of net neutrality, explores in surprising detail the history of those attention merchants among us who have ingeniously drawn our notice, then packaged it for financial and political gain, beginning (after religion, the first great harvester of attention) with the eighteenth-century penny papers of New York City and posters of Paris, then moving to British WWI propaganda campaigns, the emergence of Madison Avenue in newspaper and magazine advertising, Hitler's theories of persuasion (the masses will lend their memories only to the thousandthfold repetition of the most simple idea), the almost accidental development of commercial TV and radio in America, the parsing of geographical clusters for advertising specificity, computer games, commercially successful search engines such as AOL, and the growth of the celebrity-industrial complex, clickbait, and, of course, Facebook, Google, BuzzFeed, and the smartphone. Wu also covers our history of pushback, from government truth-in-advertising laws to the TV remote and Apple's adblockers, ending with a call for reclaiming that most precious of natural resources, our undivided attention. The end result is a serious and timely study, delivered in layperson's language, that will add depth to an ongoing, urgently needed national and global conversation.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Business is always trying to get our attention-and perhaps our souls-according to this lively if sometimes overwrought history of advertiser-sponsored media. Columbia law professor and net-neutrality advocate Wu (The Master Switch) takes readers from the 19th-century dawn of New York's penny press, when media moguls first realized that the attention of readers was their "product" and advertisers their customers, through the propaganda of wartime Britain and Nazi Germany, the advent of television's mesmeric power, and ultimately the current onslaught of garish pop-ups and click-bait junk-journalism fighting to hijack our eyeballs on the Internet. Wu's critique of the Kardashianized spiritual malaise of our society of the spectacle-"We are at risk of being not merely informed but manipulated and even deceived by ads... of living lives that are less fully our own than we imagine," he groans-feels old hat; the real problem seems to be simply how to prune back ads that have grown too invasive and annoying. Fortunately, his history is usually 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. The result is an engrossing study of what we hate about commercial media. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The nature of our lives is at stake, claims Wu (Isidor & Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Univ. Law Sch.; The Master Switch) as he looks at how advertising has shaped people's lives. In 1833, Benjamin Day started selling broadsheets for a penny in New York City. His profit was not in the price of the newspaper, but rather in what he could charge for readers' attention, which for Day was the real "product" being sold. Wu shows how this trend continued through the advent of the first screen (movies), second screen (television), third screen (computers), and most recently the fourth screen (smartphones and wearable technology). From snake oil to Netflix, the author follows the rise of advertising, the shifts in technique, and the public response. Propaganda as advertising, "demand engineering" (creating the desire for merchandise that otherwise wouldn't exist), brand loyalty, targeted ads, and item placement are all touched upon. Wu further argues that consumer revolts have arisen before but never totally succeeded. His goal is for readers to be aware of how much attention they are giving away to others. VERDICT Part history and part social wake up call, this book is for everyone.-Bonnie A. Tollefson, Rogue Valley Manor Lib., Medford, OR © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
When something online is free, then the product being sold is you. Wu (Columbia Law School; The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, 2010) elaborates on that sobering note.Think of this next time youre browsing social media and a targeted ad goes floating by: how do they know to send that ad your way? The answer lies in the fact that there are legions of humans, and behind them busy bots and vast databanks, trying to get inside your head, determine your wishes and tastes, and, more than anything else, capture your attention. Wu opens his learned, skillfully delivered treatise by pointing to a phenomenon that ought to trouble anyone with a soul, namely, the selling of ads on school marquees, sports fields, and the like to fund school activities. The school board that approved the first such deal, Wu notes, realized that it was holding an asset more lucrative than any bake salenamely, the students themselves, a captive audience almost by definition. But it goes deeper than that. As the author writes, every time we go online, were being tracked and monitored, ambushes being laid at every click. One of the most interesting passages is his account of clickbait, the villains of the piece, mild-mannered ad people, a brilliant MITtrained scientist, and the Huffington Post, among others. The result is an all-out assault on our attention, as the microfamous fill our eyes and ears and the merchants work ever harder to pull down the wall between advertising and actual content. Wu closes this broad-ranging but closely argued argument by noting that given that our lives are what we pay attention to, we are now obliged to defend the sheer reach of the attention merchant into the entirety of our lived experience. Indeed, and it involves more than simply turning off the TVthough thats a start. Forget subliminal seduction: every day, we are openly bought and sold, as this provocative book shows. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
