<p class="p1" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69);"><b>Attention Merchant :&nbsp;</b>An industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers.</p><p class="p1" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69);">In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the ^attention merchants^, contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions but the end result of more than a century^s growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to TV^s golden age to our present age of radically individualized choices, the business model of ^attention merchants^ has always been the same. He describes the revolts that have risen against these relentless attempts to influence our consumption, from the remote control to FDA regulations to Apple^s ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants grow ever-new heads, and their means of harvesting our attention have given rise to the defining industries of our time, changing our nature - cognitive, social, and otherwise - in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.</p><p class="p2" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69); min-height: 15px;"><b></b><br></p><p class="p2" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69); min-height: 15px;"><b></b><br></p><p class="p1" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69);"><b>Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.</b></p><p class="p2" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69); min-height: 15px;"><b>&nbsp;</b></p><p class="p1" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69);"><b>About the Author :</b></p><p class="p3" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69); min-height: 14px;"><br></p><p class="p1" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;; color: rgb(69, 69, 69);">Tim Wuis an author, policy advocate, and professor at Columbia University. He has been variously named as one of the leaders in science and technology, one of Harvard^s 100 most influential graduates and America^s 100 Most Influential Lawyers, and in 2014 and 2015 he was named to the "Politico 50." He formerly wrote for&nbsp;<i>Slate,</i>&nbsp;winning the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for Travel Journalism, and is a contributing writer for&nbsp;<i>The New Yorker.</i>&nbsp;In 2015, he was appointed to the Executive Staff of the Office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.</p>