The Attention Merchants

Tim Wu (2016). The attention merchants: The epic scramble to get inside our heads. Alfred A. Knopf: New York.

5-6 Industry, however, took note of what captive attention could accomplish, and since that time has treated it as a precious resource, paying ever larger premiums for it

6 the game of harvesting human attention and reselling it to advertisers has become a major part of our economy

6 "homo distractus"

7 For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default

16 This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our "automatic" attention as opposed to our "controlled" attention, the kind we direct with intent

20 This ability -- to block out most everything, and focus -- is what neuroscientists and psychologists refer to as paying attention

20 But our capacity to ignore is limited by another fact: we are always paying attention to something

26 there is a crucial difference between this sort of signage and the industrialized capture of attention

27 before the twentieth century ... the church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention

27 Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game

39 "propaganda" originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith

42 As the historians M.L. Sanders and Philip Taylor wrote, "The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world."

48 [Walter Lippmann] we overestimate our own capacity for truly independent thought

51 By 1930 ... the profits and powers derived from using access to the public mind became clear, once and for all

64 [1920s] Through its variously "scientific" techniques like demand engineering, branding, or targeting, the advertising industry had become an increasingly efficient engine for converting attention into revenue

71 it was now that advertising began to see itself in the image of the original propaganda body, the Church; its work as a mission; and its masters as capitalism's new priestly class ... 1926

71 Many of the most talented copywriters ... came from families steeped in organized religion. Some saw surprisingly little difference between the two callings

109 the Nazis had developed an advanced understanding of how to gain and use access to the minds of the public ... the Third Reich obliges us to confront directly the relationship between what we pay attention to and our individual freedom ... the Nazis effected a shutdown of free thought in the land of Kant, Schiller, and Goethe

110-111 [Adolf Hitler] Mein Kampf ... Propaganda must "be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent

118 It has been debated whether Nazism constituted a "political religion"

120 Choice may be the cornerstone of individual freedom but, as the history of humanity shows, the urge to surrender to something larger and to transcend the self can be just as urgent, if not more so. The greatest propagandists and advertisers have always understood this

120 [Dr. Paul Joseph] Goebbels wrote in 1933 ... "We want to replace liberal thinking with a sense of community that includes the whole people."

125 [television] quality of attention ... The most basic dividing line is likely between transitory and sustained attention, the former quick, superficial, and often involuntarily provoked; the latter, deep, long-lasting, and voluntary

131 [1950s] In New York, the embodiment of the new industry was Rosser Reeves, a hard-drinking, hard-sell Virginian, and yet another son of a preacher, who'd made his name as a pioneer of television advertising

140 [late 1950s] "programs are scheduled interruptions of marketing bulletins."

152 [1966 Marshall] McLuhan ... To take control of one's media consumption was therefore a form of self-determination, a seizing of one's own destiny

153 [1967 psychedelic drugs -- like LSD, Timothy Leary] pay attention to where your attention is paid; mind what you open your mind for

154 Leary ... "The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search ... for therein is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning ... The message of God never changes. It may be expressed to you in six simple words: turn on, tune in, drop out."

159 advertisers ... convert all manner of desire into demand for products

165 [1974, TV] ultimately the business model remained the resale of human attention

185 the Internet ... the greatest collector of human attention since the invention of television

186 The check-in would eventually become a widespread attentional habit 

187 In experiments pioneered by [B.F.] Skinner [1930s] and repeated over the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists demonstrated ... the somewhat surprising truth that behavior consistently rewarded is in fact more prone to "extinction" than behavior inconsistently rewarded

194 Video games ... No intentional focus is required, which explains why children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorder find the action of video games as engrossing as anyone else

215 The first great harvester of human attention, it must never be forgotten, was religion

219 [Henry] Luce ... "TIME didn't start this emphasis on stories about people ... the Bible did."

224 Chris Rojek ... absence of saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies the void is being filled by celebrity culture

264-265 it found users who were like travellers coming out of an airport, in a hurry, looking for a taxi, and there was the advertisement -- "click" ... Google would soon become the most profitable attention merchant in the history of the world. 

    Ironically, it was contempt for advertising (on the part of the founders and the chief engineers) that would ultimately pave the way to the company's unrivalled success as an attention merchant

273 2005 ... Jeffrey Jarvis ... Conversation is the kingdom, and trust is king

296-297 Facebook knew perfectly well from the outset that in advertising lay its eventual big payday ... pitches to advertisers ... touted the platform's "addicted" users and the potential of nano targeting consumers ... using age, gender, stated interests, and -- when the "like" button was first activated in 2009 -- all manner of preferences ... information that users were all handing over for free

301 the value of Facebook ... the public became like renters willingly making extensive improvements to their landlord's property

301 Facebook was first conceived to play on the social dynamics of anxious adolescents

307 Twitter thus sparked microfame, measured it, and threw fuel on the fire

312 Instagram ... an addictive form of self-affirmation

313 James Franco ... Attention is power

314-315 Let us review our story in brief ... [blah, blah, blah] ... the self as its own object of worship

318 BuzzFeed, at its height in the 2010s, undisputed king of clickbait 

326 the idea best articulated by Nicholas Carr that the web was making us stupider ... or Jaron Lanier's argument ... that the culture of the web had resulted in a suppression of individual creativity and innovation

328 Netflix

335+ 2015 Apple ... ad blocker

343 Most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime ... Over the coming century, the most vital human resource in need of conservation and protection is likely to be our own consciousness and mental space

343-344 whatever our personal goals, the things we'd like to achieve, the goals of the attention merchants are generally at odds with ours

344 William James ... held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to

344 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. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living