{ "item_title" : "The Attention Merchants", "item_author" : [" Tim Wu "], "item_description" : "From the author of the award-winning The Master Switch, who coined the term net neutrality--a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. Dazzling. --Financial Times Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention. This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. Wu's narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new medium--from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook--has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of attention merchants has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/80/417/004/0804170045_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "17.95", "online_price" : "17.95", "our_price" : "17.95", "club_price" : "17.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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