The Attention Merchants - The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

Tim Wu

Vintage

2017

432 páginas

14h 24m

ISBN-10: 0804170045

One of the Best Books of the Year
The San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox * The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term "net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time.

Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention.
This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. Wu’s narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new medium—from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook—has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of “attention merchants” has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

Nossa vida se resume ao que prestamos atenção

Excelente leitura, sobretudo no início do ano, para refletir como e com o que queremos dedicar a nossa atenção.
Em The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu se propõe a analisar como a nossa atenção tem sido capturada, de forma crescente e intensa, nos dois últimos séculos.
De fato, é curioso pensar como naturalizamos compartilhar os nossos espaços mais privados, como a mesa do jantar, a cama e o banheiro, com os mercadores da atenção. E eles são muitos: desde a televisão com as pausas para intervalos comerciais até subcelebridades promovendo produtos de origem e qualidade duvidosas em redes sociais.
Ao final, fica o convite à reflexão: quantos planos e objetivos traçados não foram completados ou sequer iniciados porque nosso tempo foi tomado pelos mercadores da atenção? E, ao fim da vida, o quanto disso representará quem fomos?