The Attention Merchants is a book of our time, touching on an emerging strain of anxiety about the information age that goes beyond gripes about digital distraction or information overload ... In its synthesis of such ostensibly disparate threads, The Attention Merchants is a bracing intellectual tour de force. But Wu writes with more brio than your average policy maven/academic.
The Attention Merchants is more survey than treatise. Few chapters offer startling new arguments, though Mr. Wu is well attuned to paradoxes and ironies ... Only in the last 50 pages, when he appraises the excesses of the modern internet does Mr. Wu turn savage, sinking enough venom into Twitter and Instagram to kill a baby monkey ... [Wu] writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet ... Mr. Wu’s chapters about the early days of advertising are some of this book’s most enjoyable, easily serving as a reader’s companion to Mad Men.
...[a] startling and sweeping examination ... Wu’s succinct reexamination [of American advertising] is important, for he shows how the nascent attempt at capturing attention was marked by a set of events that would be repeated in decades to come, each time drawing closer to the privacy of our inner lives ... One question that Wu, in The Attention Merchants, never really resolves is what exactly constitutes a meaningful use of one’s attention.
While Wu describes the dynamics within journalism, advertising, television and Internet services that brought us to this moment, he struggles to offer a path for us to take back our minds and souls. The book shies away from the prescriptive ... Those hoping to find policy and political answers to the overwhelming commercialism of civic and cultural life in America won’t find them here. Wu’s primary task in this book, however, was to write an engaging history of the attention economy, and he has succeeded in that.
...instead of bludgeoning us with data and diatribes, [Wu] deploys a series of capsule histories ... Though many of Mr. Wu’s characters in the first half of the book are fascinating, to our jaded ears their activities are not particularly shocking ... Mr. Wu is best when analyzing how the internet has taken the attention wars to a new level of sophistication ... Only as his tale concludes does Mr. Wu suggest strategies to thwart this trespass on our senses. His solutions, however, are vague and implausible.
The book is studded with sharp illustrations of those who have tried to stop the encroachment of advertising on our lives, and usually failed ... Despite the book’s occasional finger-wagging, Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect.
...[a] vigorous, entertaining new book ... as the attention merchants insert themselves into every vacant corner of our individual lives, our privacy and peace of mind will only be preserved by our individual choices. Wu’s new book is right about that, and about a great deal more.
[Wu] could hardly have chosen a better time to publish a history of attention-grabbing than the year in which a reality-TV star and infamous tweeter was elected as US president ... Wu is at times delightfully catty, bringing life to his argument ... Ultimately, The Attention Merchants is most concerned with the proper scope of advertising — with where and when rather than how it should be done.
Wu is no technological determinist. While he acknowledges that the invention of radio, television and the internet created enormous new potential for attention capture, he’s careful to point out that there was nothing inevitable about that potential being fulfilled. Just because new tools made it easier to reach more people didn’t guarantee people would pay attention ... Wu’s book isn’t just a history. It’s a polemic. The reason we need to understand where the attention industry comes from, he believes, is because it poses a mortal threat to human happiness and flourishing. It does this by inhibiting good attention, and encouraging bad attention...This is an ancient complaint, and a rather silly one. Every media innovation since the invention of writing has triggered a moral panic about whether the human experience would be hopelessly corrupted as a result ... There are few people more qualified than him to perform a nuanced analysis of online attention capture. Instead, he devotes the last 50 pages of his book to denouncing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and BuzzFeed for destroying the internet...Wu sees contemporary digital life as wholly, irredeemably corrupt. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to recognise the actual internet in his cartoonish portrait.
