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. In his new book, The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch who coined the phrase "net neutrality," explores the rise of firms whose business models are the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. Wu visits ALOUD for a revelatory look at the cognitive, social, and unimaginable ways that industries feeding on human attention are transforming our society and ourselves.
Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and professor at Columbia University, currently serving as Senior Advisor to the United States Federal Trade Commission. In 2006, he was recognized as one of fifty leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in the following year, 01238 magazine listed him as one of Harvard’s one hundred most influential graduates. He writes for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes.
Madeleine Brand is the host of KCRW’s award-winning Press Play, a show she created to bring a distinct, Southern California lens to news and culture. Madeleine has been a journalist for 25 years, primarily in public radio. She worked at NPR for 13 years in Los Angeles, New York and Washington. She’s won numerous awards for her hosting and reporting. Madeleine has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree with honors in English from UC Berkeley.
