“Ultimately, it is not our nation or culture but the very nature of our lives that is at stake. For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, “when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.” We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. The goal of what follows is to help us understand more clearly how the deal went down and what it means for all of us.”
This book is about the advertising industry and how it’s transformed over the years, influencing everything put in front of our eyeballs and earholes. It goes through the different eras of attention capture - print at first (large war propaganda posters), then radio and the birth of prime-time, up to TV and the Internet, all the way to our current mobile age.
Tim Wu’s an excellent storyteller; each of his chapters have clear hooks and narratives, and he likes to use a “question then answer” refrain to get you thinking about what might happen next, or why nobody ever thought to do X, before giving you the conclusion. And while you can enjoy this just for the history and fun facts, he also presents a larger thesis to think about as you travel through time. I highly recommend this book; Tim Wu will challenge your attention-spending habits; he’s given me a different framework for thinking about the products I make, the apps I use, the media I consume.
One neato tidbit I learned: the drive-in movie theatre originated in WWI-era Britain. To get people to volunteer for the army, the government made movie-in-a-van setups to go around and project war films on all the walls. The success of this and other methods of propaganda largely validated advertising as an industry - if it could get people to sign up by the millions to go die for their country, surely it could get people to buy stuff they don’t need.
My friend gave me this book, on condition I give it forward when I’m done (which is such an awesome tradition, and a compelling reason to buy physical books).