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The Attention Merchants
How Our Time and Attention Are Gathered and Sold
Tim Wu
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The Attention Merchants
How Our Time and Attention Are Gathered and Sold
Tim Wu
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About This Book
Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers.
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. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to TV's golden age to our present age of radically individualized choices, the business model of 'attention merchants' has always been the same. He describes the revolts that have risen against these relentless attempts to influence our consumption, from the remote control to FDA regulations to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants grow ever-new heads, and their means of harvesting our attention have given rise to the defining industries of our time, changing our nature - cognitive, social, and otherwise - in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.
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THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS
INTRODUCTION
HEREâS THE DEAL
In 2011, the Twin Rivers school district in central California faced a tough situation. The district, never wealthy, was hit hard by the housing crisis of the early 2000s and the state governmentâs own financial meltdown. By the 2010s, schools were cutting not only extracurricular activities but even some of the basics, like heat. One day in winter, a student posted a picture of a classroom thermostat reading 44 degrees Fahrenheit.
Such were the circumstances when the Twin Rivers board was approached by a company named âEducation Funding Partners.â EFP offered a tantalizing new way to help solve the districtâs financial problems, using what it called âthe power of business to transform public education.â Acting as broker, the firm promised that it could bring the district as much as $500,000 in private money per year. And, EFP stressed, its services would cost nothing. âEFP is paid solely out of corporate contributions,â the pitch explained, âessentially providing a free service to districts.â
To gain this free bounty, the board didnât actually have to do anything. It needed only to understand something: that the schools were already holding an asset more lucrative than any bake sale. That asset, simply stated, was their students, who by the very nature of compulsory education were a captive audience. If the schools could seize their attention for the purpose of educating them, why not sell off a bit of it for the sake of improving the educational experience? Specifically, EFP was proposing that Twin Rivers allow corporate advertising within the schools. Moreover, EFP explained, it would bundle students from Twin Rivers with those in other school districts around the nation so as to appeal to bigger brandsâthe Fortune 500 companiesâwith deeper pockets.
If EFP was promising the district free money, its pitch to corporate advertisers was no less seductive: âOpen the schoolhouse doors,â it said, promising âauthentic access and deep engagement with audiences in the school environment.â Advertisers have long coveted direct access to the young, who are impressionable and easier to influence. Establishing a warm association with Coca-Cola or McDonaldâs at an early age can yield payoffs that last a lifetimeâor, in the lingo, âdrive purchase decisions and build brand awareness.â That in essence is what EFP offered its clients: âan unparalleled system for engagement in the Kâ12 marketââa chance to mold the consumers of the future.
Twin Rivers soon began to see the light. âWe need to be innovative about the assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue,â said a spokeswoman. In other parts of the country, the prospect of opening schools to commercial advertising had prompted public debate. Not so in Twin Rivers, where the administrators seemed to regard signing the deal, which they did in 2012, as a matter of duty. âIn these challenging economic times,â said the chief business officer, âour students are counting on us to find ways to make our resources stretch further than ever before.â EFP, for its part, promised all messaging would be âresponsibleâ and âeducational.â With that, the school doors were thrown open.
Twin Rivers is only one of the many school districts in the United Statesâmostly in poor or middle-class areasâthat have begun to rely on selling access to their students as an essential revenue source. Some schools plaster ads across student lockers and hallway floors. One board in Florida cut a deal to put the McDonaldâs logo on its report cards (good grades qualified you for a free Happy Meal). In recent years, many have installed large screens in their hallways that pair school announcements with commercials. âTake your school to the digital ageâ is the motto of one screen provider: âeveryone benefits.â
What is perhaps most shocking about the introduction of advertising into public schools is just how uncontroversial and indeed logical it has seemed to those involved. The deals are seen as a win-win, yielding money that it would be almost irresponsible to refuse. Yet things were not always this way. There was once a time when, whether by convention or technological limitation, many parts of lifeâhome, school, and social interaction among themâwere sanctuaries, sheltered from advertising and commerce. Over the last century, however, we have come to accept a very different way of being, whereby nearly every bit of our lives is commercially exploited to the extent it can be. As adults, we are hardly ever unreachable; seldom away from a screen of some kind; rarely not being solicited or sold to. From this perspective, the school administrators are merely giving students a lesson in reality, exposing them to what is, after all, the norm for adults. But where did the norm come from? And how normal is it?
This book explains how our current state of affairs came to be. It is the consequence of the dramatic and impressive rise of an industry that barely existed a century ago: the Attention Merchants. Since its inception, the attention industry, in its many forms, has asked and gained more and more of our waking moments, albeit always, in exchange for new conveniences and diversions, creating a grand bargain that has transformed our lives. In the process, as a society and individually, we have accepted a life experience that is in all of its dimensionsâeconomic, political, social, any way you can think ofâmediated as never before in human history. And if each bargain in isolation seems a win-win, in their grand totality they have come to exert a more ambiguous though profound influence on how we live.
Who exactly are the attention merchants? As an industry, they are relatively new. Their lineage can be traced to the nineteenth century, when in New York City the first newspapers fully dependent on advertising were created; and Paris, where a dazzling new kind of commercial art first seized the eyes of the person in the street. But the full potential of the business model by which attention is converted into revenue would not be fully understood until the early twentieth century, when the power of mass attention was discovered not by any commercial entity but by British war propagandists. The disastrous consequences of propaganda in two world wars would taint the subsequent use of such methods by government, at least in the West. 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.
If the attention merchants were once primitive, one-man operations, the game of harvesting human attention and reselling it to advertisers has become a major part of our economy. I use the crop metaphor because attention has been widely recognized as a commodity, like wheat, pork bellies, or crude oil. Existing industries have long depended on it to drive sales. And the new industries of the twentieth century turned it into a form of currency they could mint. Beginning with radio, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its âfreeâ content.
As we shall see, the winning strategy from the beginning has been to seek out time and spaces previously walled off from commercial exploitation, gathering up chunks and then slivers of our un-harvested awareness. Within living memory it was thought that families would never tolerate the intrusion of broadcasting in the home. An earlier generation would find it astonishing that, without payment or even much outcry, our networks of family, friends, and associates have been recruited via social media to help sell us things. Now, however, most of us carry devices on our bodies that constantly find ways to commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention. Thus, bit by bit, what was once shocking became normal, until the shape of our lives yielded further and further to the logic of commerceâbut gradually enough that we should now find nothing strange about it.
This book shares with my previous one, The Master Switch, the basic objective of making apparent the influence of economic ambition and power on how we experience our lives. As in that book, Iâd like to pose at the outset the cynicâs eternal question: What difference does the rise of the Attention Merchants make to me? Why should I care? Quite simply because this industry, whose very business is the influence of consciousness, can and will radically shape how our lives are lived.
It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the Westâone captured by the phrase âhomo distractus,â a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices. Who has not sat down to read an email, only to end up on a long flight of ad-laden clickbaited fancy, and emerge, shaking his or her head, wondering where the hours went?
While allowing that many of us are perpetually distracted, spend too much time on social media or watching television, and consequently consume more advertising than could ever serve our own useful purposes, the cynic may still ask: But isnât it simply our choice to live this way? Of course it isâit is we who have voluntarily, or somewhat voluntarily, entered into this grand bargain with the attentional industry, and we enjoy the benefits. But it is essential that we fully understand the deal. Certainly some of our daily attentional bartersâfor news, good entertainment, or useful servicesâare good deals. But others are not. The real purpose of this book is less to persuade you one way or the other, but to get you to see the terms plainly, and, seeing them plainly, demand bargains that reflect the life you want to live.
For the history also reveals that we are hardly powerless in our dealings with the attention merchants. Individually, we have the power to ignore, tune out, and unplug. At certain times over the last century, the industry has asked too much and offered too little in return, or even been seen to violate the publicâs trust outright. At such moments, the bargain of the attention merchants is beset with a certain âdisenchantment,â which, if popular grievance is great enough, can sometimes turn into a full-fledged ârevolt.â During those revoltsâof which there have been several over the last centuryâthe attention merchants and their partners in the advertising industry have been obliged to present a new deal, revise the terms of the arrangement. We may, in fact, be living in such a time today, at least in those segments of the population committed to cord-cutting, ad-avoiding, or unplugging. We are certainly at an appropriate time to think seriously about what it might mean to reclaim our collective consciousness.
Ultimately, it is not our nation or culture but the very nature of our lives that is at stake. 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. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. The goal of what follows is to help us understand more clearly how the deal went down and what it means for all of us.
PART I
MASTERS OF BLAZING MODERNITIES
Since the rise of capitalism, it has been known that capturing someoneâs attention could cause him to part with some money. Even before that, there was paid spectacle, like the modern theater. But as recently as the late nineteenth century, the first real industries of attention capture were still embryonic, though by then, printed matter like books and broadsheets had joined live spectacle as mental fodder created for profit.
From the 1890s through the 1920s, there arose the first means for harvesting attention on a mass scale and directing it for commercial effect, thanks to what is now familiar to us in many forms under the name of advertising. At its inception it was as transformative as the cotton gin. For advertising was the conversion engine that, with astonishing efficiency, turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity. As such, attention could be not only used but resold, and this is where our story begins.
CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST ATTENTION MERCHANTS
In the summer of 1833, with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both decades from their first editions, New York Cityâs leading newspaper was The Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, a four-page daily with circulation of just 2,600 in a city of almost 300,000.1 At 6 cents, it was something of a luxury item, which was just as well, since like several of its rivals, including The Journal of Commerce, it was aimed at the cityâs business and political elite. Most New Yorkers, in fact, did not read newspapers at all; âthey went their way, if not entirely unaware of their presence, at least untouched by their influence,â as one historian put it. âThere was little or nothing about these papers to attract the average reader.â2
In this sluggish market a young man named Benjamin Day thought he spied an opportunity. A print shop proprietor who had once worked at a newspaper, the twenty-three-year-old Day decided heâd try publishing a paper of his own. The venture was risky, for his motives were different from those of many other newspapermen of his time. Day did not have a particular political agenda, nor was he a rich man subsidizing a vanity press for the presentation of his views. As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. âHe needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.â
Dayâs idea was to try selling a paper for a pennyâthe going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What Day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: ...