The Attention Merchants
Tim Wu · 2016
"Wu traces how, from the first penny press to Instagram, the business of capturing and reselling human attention has grown into the dominant engine of media — and how every attention boom triggers a backlash that resets expectations about what should be free from capture."
Wu opens with 1833: Benjamin Day launches the New York Sun at a penny while rivals charge six cents, and recoups the loss by selling readers' attention to advertisers. The reader stopped being the customer and became the product.
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Amusing Ourselves to Death
"Postman argued television doesn't just carry trivial content, it makes serious content trivial by forcing it into an entertainment form — so the danger is not that we are fooled, but that we are delighted into not wanting to know."