• New York Post, Monday, October 31, 2016 6:51 AM

Writing in the New York Post, Joshua David Stein reviews Columbia professor Tim Wu's new book, "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble To Get Inside Our Heads." Stein notes that this "epic scramble" has been going on since "at least 1890, when a young Parisian artist-turned-ad man began plastering the city with brightly colored posters of scantily clad women advertising wine." In exchange for this "eye candy, Parisians tore their gaze from the newly built boulevards and from each other. Thus, the era of modern advertising was born."  Stein notes that as the ad business moved from posters "to precision-targeted alerts that can tell you if you’re pregnant before you even know it, the power of these 'Attention Merchants' has exploded. Today ads have been secreted into every nook and cranny of our lived experience, tucked into television shows, baked into the technology we stare into, turning us into endlessly divided demographics. The consumer has become the consumed. Today, we have so many platforms — each scrambling for a way to monetize our eyeballs — we don’t even see the street we’re walking on, let alone notice the world as it passes by or even our own lives as they flicker past." This book looks like it deserves a read.

Read the whole story at New York Post »