THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS
By Tim Wu
Alfred A. Knopf, 2016, 403 pages
Reviewed by Michael Beach
This tome is subtitled The Epic Scramble to get Inside Our Heads. The focus is on how advertisers seek to gain space inside our collective and individual psyche. The ultimate goal is to encourage our economical behavior. This history looks a patterns starting with the original "snake-oil salesmen" to the modern use of social networks and other online tools.
Whether the merchants chase us with the hard sell or the soft sell, in the end, the goods and services are not what they are selling. Actually, we are the product that advertisers are selling to providers of goods and services. There has always been an element of "fake news" involved in claims made by some advertisers about the benefits of their products. It is also true that part of the intent of advertising is to convince us of needs we have we didn't know we needed before it was pointed out to us in enticing ways.
The book is an interesting look into motives, psychology, and methods of those who seek to convince us to spend our hard-earned money in specific ways.
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