The attention merchants : the epic scramble to get inside our heads
(Book)

Includes index.

Tim Wu presents a revelatory look at the rise of "attention harvesting," and its transformative effect on our society and ourselves. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants," contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.