The Attention Merchants

Tim Wu, Alfred A. Knopf, 403 pages, $28.95. Does anyone remember when Rolling Rock beer ran a campaign on highway billboards back in 2008, promising that the company would project its logo onto the next full moon? It turned out that the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up by its advertising firm. How depressing. We are living in an era when some advertising executive gazes at the moon and sees not beauty, but the Earth's most unignorable billboard. The history of the slow, steady annexation and exploitation of our consciousness — whether by television commercials, war propaganda or tweets — is the subject of Tim Wu's new book, "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads." He starts with the penny press newspapers of New York City, moves on to the heyday of radio and television and concludes with the chaotic online bazaar of the present. "The Attention Merchants" is more survey than treatise. Readers are bound to stumble on ideas and episodes of media history that they knew little about. Few chapters offer startling new arguments, though Wu is well attuned to paradoxes and ironies. Only in the last 50 pages, when he appraises the excesses of the modern internet does Wu turn savage, sinking enough venom into Twitter and Instagram to kill a baby monkey. Because "The Attention Merchants" is comprehensive and conscientious, Wu, the author of "The Master Switch," lawyer and star professor at Columbia Law School — he famously coined the term "net neutrality" — is clearly in the habit of laying out his arguments in logical, progressive steps.

NEW YORK TIMES