Tim Wu on Ads' Battle for Your Attention

摘要

Tim Wu not only wears a few hats-he changes a few diapers. The author, activist and Columbia University professor, perhaps best known for coining the phrase "net neutrality," greeted a visitor to his apartment in New York's Chelsea neighborhood recently with his 3-month-old daughter, Essie, curled compactly in one of his arms. Quick with a smile, he looked remarkably placid given her age and the fact he was also nurturing a professional newborn, his recently published book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. A quasi-sequel to The Master Switch, his seminal history of communications monopolies, the new book weaves a fascinating narrative through the two-century quest for advertising revenue. It connects a series of evolutionary stages and explains their defining actors and how each informed the next-the penny press, medicine hucksters, radio soap operas, wartime propaganda, television, the internet and social networks.