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Tim Wu QUOTES

Tim Wu QUOTES

1 " Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash. "

― Tim Wu , The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

2 " As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. ''He needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.''
Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny - the going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood-more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him-was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

3 " My experience is what I agree to attend to. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

4 " When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? "

― Tim Wu , The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

5 " Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

6 " The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

7 " 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. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

8 " Every instant of every day we are bombarded by information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds (respectively) across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths; our skin and the rest of our innervated parts send their own messages of sore muscles or cold feet. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

9 " It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life's immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

10 " It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West - one captured by the phrase ''homo distractus,'' a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

11 " We've already seen the attention merchant's basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. but a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our ''automatic'' attention as opposed to our ''controlled'' attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience's baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant-just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

12 " kings and queens once depended on the mystique of inaccessibility as an expression of power. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

13 " choices may be the cornerstone of individual freedom but, as the history of humanity shows, the urge to surrender to something larger and to transcend the self can be just as urgent, if not more so. The greatest propagandists and advertisers have always understood this. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

14 " For most of human history, the proliferation of the individual likeness was the sole prerogative of the illustrious, whether it was he face of the emperor on a Roman coin or the face of Garbo on the silver screen. The commercialization of photography may have broadened access to portraiture somewhat, but apart from wanted posters, the image of most common people would never be widely propagated. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

15 " programs are scheduled interruptions of marketing bulletins. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

16 " For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

17 " It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to. "

― Tim Wu , The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

18 " When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

19 " The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

20 " When an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product. "

― Tim Wu , The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads