The Attention Merchants - A History of the Penny Press

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The attention merchants are the people who modified and learned how to find and acquire our attention. The book is slightly modelled, actually, after upton saint clair's oil in the sense that it takes ention as this commodity whose value was not very well understood. I think of it almost like oil drilling and mining. Wt what can we learn going back, especially to the period of the penny press or yellow journalism, from them to day's issues with technology platforms?

An information system that relies on advertising was not born with the Internet. But social media platforms have taken it to an entirely new level, becoming a major force in how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Columbia law professor Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness, takes us through the birth of the eyeball-centric news model and ensuing boom of yellow journalism, to the backlash that rallied journalists and citizens around creating industry ethics and standards. Throughout the 20th century, radio, television, and even posters elicited excitement, hope, fear, skepticism and greed, and people worked together to create a patchwork of regulation and behavior that attempted to point those tools in the direction of good. The Internet has brought us to just such a crossroads again, but this time with global consequences that are truly life-and-death.