#Attention attention review serial

If anything, they probably accelerated it. Yet these small rebellions did little to halt advertising’s ascent. In the 1950s, the invention of the remote control gave television watchers the power to press mute – thus “arming a new popular resistance against the industrialised harvest of attention”, Wu writes. In the 1930s, a rising consumer movement forced the US federal government to start policing ads for factual inaccuracies. And as mass media mediates more of our time – as the average American’s media consumption goes from an hour spent huddled around the family radio to endless hours on Google or Twitter or Facebook – the amount of attention available for resale grows. Companies come up with new ways to get our attention, and then sell that attention to other companies.

Wu’s book crams many case studies into its pages, but the basic recipe remains remarkably consistent over the years. Sometimes it involved improving an existing one, like Oprah’s elevation of the tabloid talkshow format into respectable middlebrow fare.

#Attention attention review serial

Sometimes this involved creating an entirely new cultural form, such as the radio serial or reality TV. To use Wu’s metaphor, companies had to cultivate attention before they could harvest it.įew more qualified to analyse online attention-capture … Tim Wu. Just because new tools made it easier to reach more people didn’t guarantee people would pay attention. While he acknowledges that the invention of radio, television and the internet created enormous new potential for attention capture, he’s careful to point out that there was nothing inevitable about that potential being fulfilled. It is less a history of advertising than of how this enclosure happened: the technologies, platforms and formats that have made it possible for media to penetrate an ever-growing portion of our waking lives. Wu’s book tells the story of this conquest, recording the extraordinarily successful attempts by advertisers to occupy more and more of our attention over the past 100 years. The first involved literal colonisation the latter, the colonisation of everyday life. Another was to boost demand at home, by creating new desires for consumer goods and allowing wage levels to rise to the point where people could act on them. One way to deal with this problem had been to conquer parts of Asia and Africa and make new markets by force – imperialism. Many decades of rapid industrial expansion in the capitalist west had produced an excess of productive capacity. In addition to enriching themselves and their corporate clients, these “attention merchants” performed a critical economic function. Over the course of the 1920s, a powerful class of commercial propagandists emerged, particularly in the US. Like many lucrative industries then and since, advertising took a publicly financed innovation and repurposed it for profit. If people could be persuaded to choke to death on poison gas in a foreign country, they could be persuaded to buy things Thus the modern advertising industry was born.

If governments could convince their citizens to choke to death on poison gas in a foreign country, surely the private sector could apply the same techniques to persuade people to buy things. The overwhelming success of the British propaganda effort proved “the power of mass attention”, he writes, and taught corporations everywhere a valuable lesson. Wu identifies this moment as a major turning point in what he calls the “industrialisation of human attention capture”. And it worked: stirred by this unprecedented experiment in state-sponsored persuasion, millions of young men marched off to gruesome, pointless deaths in a gruesome, pointless war. It filled vans with film projectors and screened patriotic films in towns across Britain. It printed 50 million big, colourful recruitment posters and plastered them on shops, houses, buses and trams throughout the country. To build a bigger army, the British government embarked on the first systematic propaganda campaign in history. In 1914 Germany could mobilise 4.5 million men the best Britain could do was 700,000. In his new book, he targets another kind of corporate domination: the industry that monopolises our attention.Īccording to Wu, this industry emerged from the first world war. An author, activist and lawyer, he is most famous for coining the phrase “net neutrality” – the idea that the oligopoly that owns our internet infrastructure shouldn’t charge differently for different kinds of data. T im Wu is an expert on concentrations of power.