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

by Tim Wu

reality had been a momentous discovery, even if something of a misnomer. For what viewers were flocking to was both real and not real, a distortion for the sake of spectacle, calibrated to harvest the most attention at the lowest price possible. It was, however, real enough to be believed—not literally perhaps, but in the way scripted drama is believed—and, by the new millennium, to have a whole nation of viewers content, in effect, to watch versions of themselves with vicarious delight. Thus would television enter the new millennium, perilously dependent on someone else’s idea of real life yet still the reigning champion of the twentieth century’s breathless contest for attention.

To the purist, few things are smellier than advertising, and once you step in it, there is no easy way to fully wipe it off.

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 unrivaled success as an attention merchant. The key was in renegotiating the terms under which the public was asked to tolerate ads.

Even if AdWords was a paradigm shift, it was still advertising, and Google, however ingenious, was still an attention merchant. It would, henceforth, always be serving two masters, beauty and the beast.

a platform anyone could use jostled the media hierarchy and its authority.

Jeffrey Jarvis declared that “in our post-scarcity world, distribution is not king and neither is content. Conversation is the kingdom, and trust is king.”

In business, invention is often said to be overrated as compared with execution. Perhaps the best proof of this idea yet to be offered by the twenty-first century is the success of Facebook, a business with an exceedingly low ratio of invention to success.

once the novelty wore off, online content was circumscribed by the imagination of its users; that makes it sound unlimited, but in practice that wasn’t the case.

The power of networks. The madness of crowds.

Facebook had supposedly replaced cyberspace with something more “real,” but what it created in fact was just another realm of unreality, one that, on account of looking real, was more misleading.

Instagram is the crowning achievement of that decades-long development that we have called the “celebrification” of everyday life and ordinary people, a strategy developed by attention merchants for the sake of creating cheap content.

Technology doesn’t follow culture so much as culture follows technology. New forms of expression naturally arise from new media, but so do new sensibilities and new behaviors.

users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.”